Sitches Aplenty
by BenRG
Summary: A repository of KP shorts that might arise in my mind. Entirely random updates as and when the bunny bites. Generally K/R but might have multi or other ships - UPDATE - KP/Avatar Fusion Concept Summary
1. Zorpox the Conqueror

**Sitches Aplenty**

A Repository of KP Shorts

**Disclaimer**

Kim Possible and the characters and situations of the Kim Possible universe were created by Mark McCorkle and Bob Schooley for the Disney Channel and are the copyright of the Walt Disney Corporation. This is a non-profit fan work for free distribution through the world-wide web. No breach of trademark or copyright is intended.

**Author's Notes**

This is going to be a series of short stories where I take Kim Possible, her friends and her enemies places dictated by my own imagination. These short stories are not part of any larger continuity and will only be linked if I specifically say so in my introductory notes.

Censor: T – Just for safety's sake

In this first story, I wanted to change the game plan a little. Let Kim face off against a foe who is competent and who just _might_ have planned a head. A foe who, perhaps, isn't quite what Kim thinks he is and may not want what she thinks he wants.

**Zorpox the Conqueror**

Kim flexed her fists and glared at the blue-skinned... _thing_ that had once been her husband. "I'm not going to be stopped by the face you wear, _Zorpox_," she hissed, focussing on him and not on the myriad automated weapons glaring unblinkingly at her. "I'm not going to let the fact that you _were_ Ron Stoppable get in the way. I'm not letting you conquer the world."

Zorpox's laughter was all the more horrible because of its clear echoes of Ron's easy-going chuckles. "Ah, my dear, dear wife," he mocked. "So naive in her simplistic view of the world. Still, it will be my pleasure to educate... Please don't move, Jocelyn or it _will _be your last movement. There have been four robot laser guns trained on your head from the moment you entered this chamber." To the left and slightly behind Zorpox, Joss froze and her eyes tracked to her older cousin's face. Kim nodded, clearly seeing the bright electric green of the ranging lasers on the younger woman's forehead. Joss nodded back, swallowing slightly and allowed her assassin's knife to fall from her hand.

Kim kept her focus on her enemy. Joss was a big girl and could work out her own escape plan. "Zorpox, whatever your crazy scheme is, it won't work."

Ron... _Zorpox_ raised an eyebrow mockingly before swaggering away from Kim and Joss and sitting on his 'throne', a chair that Kim suddenly realised was a duplicate of the Emperor's command chair from _The Return of the Jedi_. "On the contrary, my darling Kimberley Anne, I think it has the greatest chance of working. It was Wade, ironically enough, who inspired me. A simple enough notion: that the world's over-reliance on microprocessors could easily be its downfall. In even the simplest appliance now, there is a microchip controlling its functions. It was child's play, once I knew my target, to subvert them. All I have to do, my dear Kimberley Anne, is to press a single button and every advanced weapon system in the world will be reduced to a pile of expensive scrap metal!" Zorpox laughed evilly. "Can you imagine it, my love? Armies, navies, air forces, all disarmed! Turned into poorly-trained light infantry relying on small arms to resist entire _legions_ of my mecha and robot soldiers! With one move, I would become the single mightiest power on this planet, able to impose my will on _anyone_."

Kim winced. She could well believe it too. Ron always did have a near-_supernatural _ability with technology and Zorpox had that ability honed to a razor's edge. "Ability to conquer isn't the ability to rule, Zorpox."

"Of course not," the blue-skinned megalomaniac replied in a surprisingly convivial tone. "Which makes the civilian services' reliance on the same technology so convenient. It is he who controls information technology that controls who receives supplies. Medicine, fuel, transportation, electrical power, communications services... even the staples of food and water! How long do you think that civilisation would last once they were cut off?"

"But... but millions would die!" Joss protested.

If Zorpox was affected by that fact, he hid it well. "About four to five billion actually, Jocelyn, once you factor in the deaths from disease, starvation and cold after the first full year. Within ten years, my simulations suggest that the human population of Earth would have shrunk to less than sixty million, less than _one percent_ of its current numbers."

"You MONSTER!" Kim screamed. "I won't let you do it! This ends _here_!" She charged forwards, only to strike an invisible electrical barrier that blew her half-way back across the room. When Kim staggered to her feet, she saw the smirk on the would-be-world conqueror's face.

Zorpox's deadly brown eyes seemed to hold Kim prisoner as firmly as any metal clamp or force-field. "My dear Kimberley Anne," he purred. "What do you take me for? I am not an imbecile like Lipsky, who would casually reveal his plot to you so you can upset it at the last minute!" Zorpox laughed dangerously. "Do you really think that I would have allowed you here into my inner sanctum or told you _anything_ if you had the slightest chance of stopping it?" He laughed scornfully at the expression of growing horror on Kim and Joss' faces. "I threw the metaphorical 'switch' over an hour ago, whilst you were still fighting your way through the synthedrones posing as my elite bodyguards! By now, I should imagine that most of the remaining large-scale resistance has been... pacified."

Kim's face drained of all colour and she nearly collapsed. Was it possible that she had... _failed_? Could it be that Zorpox had... _won?_ _NO! _Her mind refused to give up. She would find a way to reverse this! She would resist! Even if she had to pull the remains of this world together to fight this madman with her own bare hands! However, first she had to find this maniac's weakness so she could exploit it. "So... when do you make your announcement?"

Zorpox seemed genuinely puzzled. "Announcement?"

"Declaring victory and the enthronement of the Emperor Zorpox the First?" Kim put a lot of scornful irony on the title and name.

Zorpox grinned. "Oh, my darling wife, there won't be any 'announcement'. Indeed, beyond a few score souls, I doubt that anyone will ever know what _really_ happened tonight." Zorpox seemed to enjoy looking at the expression of shock and confusion on the two women's faces. He pressed a button on one of the armrests of his 'throne' and two office-style chairs popped up from the floor. "Please, sit," he said. "No need for you two to stand there like you are about to do anything, because, you _aren't_." Kim regarded the chair in front of her as if it were a torture implement. Finally, at an impatient gesture from Zorpox, she sat. A very nervous Joss, only too well aware of Zorpox's comments about robot lasers tracking her, did the same.

"My dear Kimberley Anne," Zorpox began. "Do you have any clue how much work is involved in being the sole ruler of a planet? The paperwork alone staggers the mind!"

"I haven't researched it the way you have, obviously," Kim said sarcastically.

Zorpox laughed in response. "Probably not. Combined with the armies of bureaucrats and flunkies you would have very little power, very much work and absolutely _no_ fun. That really isn't my style."

"So then...?" Joss began.

"So what is my ultimate plan, my dear cousin-in-law? Simple in the extreme. I will rule this world _by one remove_. Even as we speak, specially-programmed advanced synthedrones are taking charge of the battered remains of governments and armies, rallying the people and waving the flag. With their supreme organisational abilities, they will overwhelm the robot armies invading our beautiful world. After their hard-fought victory, it is they who will, naturally enough, be entrusted with leading the post-war rebuilding. Guided by my hidden hand, they will put together the organisational tools required to minimise the loss of life caused by this dark day when the microchip turned against the civilisation that had become its slave. These great liberators will, naturally enough, become the guiding lights and implicitly-trusted leaders of the coming age of rebuilding."

"One _you _have mapped out," Kim said in a dangerously mild tone.

"Of course," Zorpox agreed cheerfully. "I will provide the overall direction and the guiding vision and my creations will direct the people. New educational programs, new standards for communications and entertainment. New rules about personal conduct. New, exciting visions for mastering nature and expanding humanity's reach far beyond our globe. People will bask in the glories of the new age, never knowing that it is the age... of _Zorpox_."

Joss then did something that both Kim and Zorpox felt was remarkably stupid. "Yes they will!" she cried out, leaping to her feet. "We'll tell them! Right Cuz?"

Zorpox looked at Joss with such withering scorn that she felt herself start to shift nervously as if she had been caught out in a horrible social _faux pas _by Nana. "Will you? Deprive a people who have had their civilisation crushed of their last hope? Could you do that? Could you deprive of humanity of their one remaining hope of reclaiming what was taken from them? Ninety-nine percent of the world's population dead, Jocelyn Marie Load. All on _your _conscience. _Every last one of them. _Could you do that?"

Joss paled and swallowed, looking like she wanted to be sick. Finally, she shook her head convulsively and, with a broken expression of defeat, sat down again with an audible 'thud'.

"Why?" Kim breathed out. "Why are you doing this?"

"Ah! At last we reach the _important _question," Zorpox announced. "There are many reasons but my personal power is not as high up the list as I imagine you believe that it is. Here." Zorpox reached out and handed a surprised Kim a flash drive. "Your own personal copy - I have several others in various places, as well as a master on my personal system. It will run on your Kimmunicator."

Kim looked at the finger drive with some suspicion. "What is this?"

"Call it... 'The Zorpox Manifesto'," the super-villain replied. "It started off as a hobby really, whilst I wasn't creating new recipes for the restaurant, but it became my guiding light and my reason for my being." Zorpox leant back. "In some ways it is a list. It lists all the injustices ignored, all the corruption so endemic and ingrained into every level of every institution, both governmental and commercial, that any meaningful reform is impossible. It lists all the casually-plotted and carried out crimes of governments, corporations and religions for hundreds of years. It maps out how, throughout history, the desire to possess a few shards of shiny metal of, more recently, see a slightly higher digit on a computer print-out has motivated men and women alike to carry out the most horrible atrocities. It shows how the ordinary man and woman, the 'salt of the earth' has become so hypnotised with near-poisonous fast food, legal narcotics, mindless and corrupting 'entertainments' and carefully-censored 'news' that they think they live in a paradise and will do and think whatever those controlling those commodities _tell_ them to do or think. This document shows how society is _sick _from its core to its skin and _could never be reformed by ANY non-violent means_."

Zorpox had nearly been shouting towards the end of that rant and he clearly needed to take a few breaths to calm himself again. "And the most horrible thing, KP, was that I realised we were not helping - indeed, we were _enablers_ of this slow-motion stagnation and corruption. Protecting it and allowing the rot to fester on and continue as it had for centuries, untroubled."

"Ro... Zorpox," Kim had to catch herself because, for a few moments, she was half-convinced that it _was_ Ron, her wonderful, open-hearted husband who could be moved to tears by a tragedy on the TV news or would rant for hours about injustices that no one seemed willing to counter. Worse she found herself half-agreeing with this madman's view of society as being incorrigible and irredeemable, suitable only for being swept away. "Zorpox, it isn't our place to decide how this world is..."

"If not us, then _who_, Kimberley Anne?" Zorpox snapped. "The voters perhaps? Who are given lists of candidates who are carefully-vetted to ensure that they will not trouble the existing order and who are _told_ by the so-called news media who is and is not an acceptable candidate to vote for? Who are told even what to _think_ or _believe_? Who are carefully guided to accept only certain political views as acceptable and that any radical plan for change as inherently dangerous and wicked?"

"Or perhaps we should place our hopes in groups like the police or Global Justice, who are appointed, funded and ultimately controlled by these self-same politicians, controlled by corrupt vested interests?" Zorpox shook his head firmly. "No, KP, as much as it broke my heart, I realised that there was no way to change things from within the system, for _the system itself was created to prevent this change from taking place_!" Zorpox sighed. "They would all use the same excuses about 'proper process' and 'lawful and constitutional means', either not knowing or not caring that these processes and laws only existed _to protect this malignant canker from ever being changed_."

"Woah! Crazy conspiracy theory much?" Joss sneered.

Zorpox, surprisingly enough, did not seem offended. "My dear, Joss," he said. "My dear, wilful, stupidly courageous Joss. The only true 'crazy conspiracy theory' is the belief that there _is_ no conspiracy. Oh, there is no monolithic structure, I agree. No one cabal controlling everything, but there is a _de facto _conspiracy of common purpose and method held by many different informal ruling groups that is just as powerful, or even more so, than any mythical 'Illuminati'."

Zorpox smiled again, this time a bitter, rueful smile that broke Kim's heart. Suddenly, it was two years ago, for it was the same smile on Ron's face when he suddenly announced to her that he was leaving their home and that he didn't know when or even _if_ he would return. _I'm gonna change the world, KP_, he had told her. _But I can't do it myself. So I've brought back Zorpox. _Then he had shot her with a taser he had hidden in the palm of his hand and had calmly walked away as she lay, convulsing and only semi-conscious, on the porch_._

"No one else could or would do it, KP," Zorpox said, and now he _did_ sound like Ron. "No one else would step up to the plate. So it was left to me, KP. I decided that I would save the world, not by working from within this corrupt, sick society, but _breaking_ it, melting it down to its base elements and then _reforging it anew_. A better world, KP. A saner world. A more _just _world. I can do this. I _must_ do this or I will never be able to face God when I finally reach the judgement seat. And, if I must, I will _do it alone_."

Kim started when she realised that Zorpox's impassioned speech was finally over. She looked into his warm brown eyes and then her eyes tracked down to the gloved hand extended to her. Kim's mind refused to accept what she had heard, what she was now seeing. "I don't _want _to do it alone, KP," Zorpox continued. "You've always been my strength. Will you be that strength for me now and for the long lifetime ahead of me of struggling to make this world what it could be? What it _should_ be?"

Kim swallowed and looked at her own hand which was already half-way out to touch Zorpox's... or was it Ron's? Nothing that had happened here made any sense any more. None of it fitted in with Kim's preconceptions and she was having a hard time deciding on _who_ it was sitting opposite her and what it is she was supposed to do next. "As... as your Queen, Zorpox?" she asked in a shaky, disoriented tone of voice.

Zorpox smiled in that heart-rendingly familiar way. "No... What was it the Pentateuch said when describing the first wife? Ah yes... 'a companion for him as a helper and a compliment for him'."

Kim swallowed harshly as she looked at the love and the silent plea in Zorpox's expression. She looked at her hand, her treacherous hand that was half-way to taking Zorpox's and heard Joss' gasp. She looked at her cousin and saw the terror in the younger woman's eyes, the certainty that, in the end, Kim's love for Ron would overwhelm every other consideration, that Kim _would_ choose to stand with her husband. That she would betray everything she had ever believed in to be with the man that she loved as much as she loved life itself.

Suddenly, Kim pulled her hand back and felt a strange sort of guilt as she watched anger, sorrow and _pain _flash over Zorpox's features. "No, Zorpox," she said at last. "I would never help you. You are the antithesis of _everything _I believe in. I would _never_ co-operate with someone determined to be a tyrant, even if he wishes to be an _enlightened _tyrant." Kim couldn't miss the near-hysterical level of relief on Joss' face but she couldn't shift her own deep and overwhelming feeling that she had just committed a betrayal as black as the one in Gethsemene.

Zorpox sighed and all emotion fled his face, leaving behind an icy, metallic mask of _duty_. "Very well," he said at last, his eyes narrowed. "In truth, I had half expected this, Kimberley Anne. You were always the _believer_ of us. The one who saw the best of all possible worlds. You saw a flag and saluted, you saw an authority and trusted it and you believed the best of _everyone_." He snorted and continued with a mocking smirk. "Except Bon-bon and Shego, of course."

There was no gesture, no indication that Zorpox had summoned them but suddenly the room was filled with Zorpox's nightmarish skeletal war robots. Merciless metal hands seized Kim and Joss, binding them hand and foot and forcing shock-collars onto their necks to cause pain if they attempted resistance. "Take these ladies to their... _guest rooms_," Zorpox commanded. "They are to remain undamaged until I decree otherwise... unless they insist on being _too_ tiresomely heroic, of course."

As the robots (that Zorpox had deliberately designed to resemble the robot skeletons from the _Eliminator_ movies) dragged Kim and Joss out, Kim had one last barb to throw. "I'll stop you, Zorpox! I'll free the world from you! I won't do it for any of the reasons you think! I'll do it for _Ron_!"

Zorpox's expression did not change until Kim and Joss were gone and the doors to the chamber had closed and sealed again. As the ultimate, secret ruler of a new age sat alone in his mighty throne at the centre of his place of power, an observer might have been startled to watch a single tear run down his blue-skinned cheeks. "Merciful God," he whispered into the still room. "Merciful God, give me the strength that I need to do this _alone_."


	2. First Strike

**Sitches Aplenty**

A Repository of KP Shorts

**Disclaimer**

Kim Possible and the characters and situations of the Kim Possible universe were created by Mark McCorkle and Bob Schooley for the Disney Channel and are the copyright of the Walt Disney Corporation. This is a non-profit fan work for free distribution through the world-wide web. No breach of trademark or copyright is intended.

**Author's Notes**

This is going to be a series of short stories where I take Kim Possible, her friends and her enemies places dictated by my own imagination. These short stories are not part of any larger continuity and will only be linked if I specifically say so in my introductory notes.

Censor: T – Just for safety's sake

Something different now. KP sings some Space Opera as the Lowardians step up for a rematch. A KP/Stargate/Babylon 5 fusion, if you squint

**First Strike (Part 1 of the Lowardian Wars Cycle)**

The Lowardian starfleet gathered at the star known to human science as 30 Erandi was hardly an overwhelming force by the standards of this interstellar empire. In their defence, it was hardly necessary to dedicate more than the dozen ships-of-the-line, a score of escorts and a further score of troop- and walker-laden assault ships to this mission. The planet known to its inhabitants (with remarkable lack of imagination) as 'Earth' was barely even civilised by the Lowardians' standards. Incapable of travelling further than its one natural satellite, its people were still divided by primitive tribal and religious rivalries and had only just begun to conceive the concept of travel beyond its star system.

Normally, not even a force of this size would be considered necessary to tackle such a target. The only reason practically a sector squadron had been gathered was the fate of General Warhok and his favoured lieutenant, Warmonga.

Warhok was hardly a hero of the Empire. Even by the brutal standards of the Lowardian civilisation, he was considered little better than a thug. His laughable claim to be 'the greatest warrior in the galaxy' had long been a cause of mirth amongst his peers. However, he was an ideal tool for certain tasks, specifically the conquest, subjugation and pacification of primitive worlds that would pay for themselves in slave labour and resources. No one doubted his estimate that his War Destroyer, the _Jade Vengeance_ was more than sufficient to take and secure the primitive world for the Empire without any assistance from other fleet units.

However, the _Jade Vengeance_ was now spread out in low orbit around Earth in a million pieces. Warhok and Warmonga were both missing, presumed dead along with the War Destroyer's thousand-strong crew. This was a humiliation that High Command could not ignore (even though they might be secretly pleased at the braggart's death). Thus this force had been assembled both as a second wave against Earth but also to serve, if need be, as a punitive force. The Lowardian Empire had many enemies, after all, and it was imperative that none of them were allowed to form the conclusion that the Lowardian Empire could be defied with impunity.

The exact method by which Warhok had met his fate remained uncertain with the only clue being a nearly-incomprehensible message from the _Jade Vengeance_,a few minutes before its destruction, about being attacked by 'sentient flora'. Pre-attack reconnaissance had shown no indication that such creatures existed on Earth so the assumption currently being made by Imperial Intelligence was that this was some manner of genetically-modified weapon deployed by the Earthlings. One of the squadron's missions was to evaluate the threat posed to the Empire by these primitives. If they were possessed of technology that could match or (unthinkable as it might seem) overwhelm Imperial forces if deployed on a large enough scale, then the fleet commander's orders were to ensure that it did not fall into the hands of the Empire's many enemies. Ideally, that meant taking the planet, and the technology, for the glory of Lowardia. If that was not possible, General Bludgorje's orders were to sterilise the planet with a massive bombardment from orbit. Either way, the races of the galaxy would learn the penalty of defying the will of the Emperor.

Aboard his flagship, the _Terror of Ages_, Bludgorje received the last acknowledgement from the commanders of his various ships and gave the order for the fleet to make the transition into hyperspace, the higher-dimensional plane that allowed flight between stars in a matter of days rather than the decades necessary with the most powerful space drives.

Within a week, the fleet was in striking range of Earth. Keeping the majority of his fleet in hyperspace and thus undetectable, Bludgorje sent a single scout/escort ship into real-space with orders to scout the planet and determine the state of its defences.

_

* * *

_

As the scout swept past the orbit of the uninhabitable desert world fourth out from the primary, its crew did not notice the stealth-coated object not much larger than a standing human. The cylindrical device was nearly featureless apart from a mind-boggling array of sensor apparatus and a blue emblem painted on its side - a map of the Earth viewed from its North Pole surrounded by an oak leaf wreath.

_On the third world out from the primary, Dr. Wade Load was roused from his sleep by the warning buzzer on his sophisticated computer system._

* * *

Upon the scout's return, Bludgorje had a considerable amount of food for thought. It seemed that the primitives had been busy in the solar rotation or two that had passed since Warhok's disastrous attempted invasion. Not for the first time, Bludgorje cursed the slow pace of the deliberations of High Command and the thin stretch of the Imperial Navy in the face of Lowardia's many enemies. It had taken _too long_ to gather this punitive force.

Where before, only robot monitoring and communications relay devices as well as a single, primitive space habitat orbited the planet, now a huge space platform was taking shape, one large even by the scale of Lowardian engineering. Additionally, heavily-armoured satellites were looping around the planet on a variety of orbits, their unblinking sensors doubtless used to target their primitive but powerful laser armament. A habitat had also appeared on the natural satellite, doubtless surrounded by further laser and missile defences that were undetectable at a distance by being buried in the rocky world's regolith.

"It looks like they have been working on their defences, my General," remarked Bludgorje's second-in-command, Captain Doomfyre.

"They would have to be sub-sentient not to after that imbecile Warhok's clumsy attack," was Bludgorje's opinion. "It doesn't matter, though. Nothing they have even now is a match for us. They've just given us more things to shoot at." The general stood back and observed the huge large-scale tactical map of the Earth, its single natural satellite and the space around both. "Our Knife squadrons will open this engagement," he decreed. "Inform the squadron commanders that their objective is to engage only the defence platforms. They are then to enter the atmosphere and attack all major military targets. The main fleet will follow them in and, after destroying that big space platform, will start a bombardment of the hundred largest population centres. I'm sure after we get the death toll comfortably over 100 million, they will be willing to accept our terms for their capitulation."

The two Lowardian officers laughed cruelly. "It wouldn't do for them to escape unscathed after the insult they did to the pride of the Empire, sir," Doomfyre remarked.

Bludgorje nodded in agreement. "That reminds me. High Command indicates that there are four individuals it wants taken alive, if at all possible. They have been identified from analysis of the transmissions from the _Jade Vengeance_ as being instrumental in Warhok's defeat. The High Council wants them alive for a public trial and execution." Bludgorje looked at a portable display screen. "Their names are... ah yes. Sherylin Goh, alias Shego, Drew Lipsky, alias Dr. Drakken, Ron Stoppable and Kim Possible." The big Lowardian male shook his head. "Such strange names these creatures have. Even stranger that we should regard what happened to that over-promoted slave overseer as important enough to determine military objectives!" He shook his head in surprise. "In any case, all commanders are to look out for mentions of those names in any communications intercepts. Any location where they seem likely to be present is to be taken intact."

Doomfyre's eyes narrowed with annoyance. "That could prove difficult, sir."

Bludgorje nodded in agreement. "Beyond any shadow of doubt. However, our orders are clear." Doomfyre bowed and was about to turn to relay these orders when Bludgorje's voice stopped him. "Doomfyre... ensure the commanders are aware of these objectives but inform them that, if the tactical situation requires it... Well, I will not question the actions of any commander who felt it necessary to destroy a target where these individuals may have been hiding." Doomfyre grinned malevolently and turned back to the fleet communications station.

_

* * *

_

'Beep-beep-de-beep!'

_"What's the sitch, Wade?"_

_"Kim, we've just got word from the Deep Space Watch Perimeter probes."_

_Kim Possible's stomach clenched as she looked at her fiancé, Ron Stoppable, playing with his little sister in Middleton Park. Suddenly she couldn't feel the warmth of the sun on this summer's day. "The Lowardians?"_

_"The ship we detected is an exact duplicate of the scout that Warmonga used during her first visit." Kim nodded firmly. She was about to speak when Wade interrupted her. "Kim... if the subspace sensors that Jim and Tim designed really work... then there are about __**fifty **__Lowardian ships waiting in hyperspace. At least a dozen of them are as big as Warhok's dreadnought."_

_Kim Possible felt sick. She had known that this day would come but she had prayed that they would have more time. "Of course," she thought to herself sadly, "no amount of time would have ever been enough." She looked down at the face of one of her oldest friends again and tried to give him a reassuring smile. As Betty Director always said, it helped if subordinates thought that their commanders were confident, no matter how bad the sitch. "Wade, send out the general alert," she ordered. She considered her next words with care. "Ron and I will need a ride to the_ Prometheus_. Tell the Joint Chiefs that I recommend Plan Fall Back."_

_Wade nodded. "God go with you, Kim," he said at last._

_Kim blinked away her tears and smiled back. "God go with us all, Wade. Should I send Joss to the bunker?"_

_Wade shook his head with a sad grin. "She'd never forgive you, Kim. Let her live up to her family's reputation, for better or for worse. She'd never be happy otherwise!"_

_Kim nodded. As Wade cut the connection, she looked up. "Ron?"_

_Ron looked up from where he was engaged in a tickle attack on little Hana. "KP?"_

_"Ron! Mission time! Those blue-skinned monsters are back!"_

_Ron's face hardened and Kim saw his eyes briefly flash blue. "I've got your back KP!" he announced with quiet confidence._

_Kim grinned. "I've got yours too," she replied, trying to match his tone. There was a sudden sonic boom and Kim looked up to see their ride approaching. "You rock, Wade," she said quietly. She turned back to Ron. "Come on, we've got enough time to drop Hana off with Mom at the Medical Centre before we have to go where we need to go."_

* * *

In space, just beyond what would be known to the inhabitants of Earth as Geosynchronous Earth Orbit, a dozen blue vortexes suddenly blossomed into existence and vomited out a plague of several hundred small dagger-shaped spacecraft. These ships, about the size of a business jet, were Lowardian Knife-ships, their equivalent in conceptual terms to a fighter. However, unlike the human idea of a fighter, these combined the functions of interceptor, patrol ship, attack platform and even light assault craft. As well as destroy other spacecraft, they were also intended to insert small ground attack parties to destroy small enemy strong points and capture high-value personnel without having to commit one of the huge and vulnerable assault drop ships to the mission.

These ships were the first wave of the Lowardian assault on the primitive world. Their wing commander was no fool. He was a veteran of many missions against the Empire's many military foes and knew that even the simplest mission could go horribly awry with little or no warning. Oh, this was supposed to be virtually a pre-spaceflight world with the most primitive of technological bases, barely above clubs and thrown rocks! However, they had destroyed an Imperial battlecruiser and had defeated a commander and crew experienced in the mission of pacification. He would take nothing for granted.

In an almost beautiful formation, the waves of Knife-ships swept towards the blue-white planet. "Are we picking up active sensor emissions from the defence platforms?" he asked his Electronic Warfare Officer.

"Not at this time, Captain. However, they may be using passive-only targeting to improve their stealth protocols."

The wing commander nodded. "Assign each squad a different target. I want those formations kept tidy and I don't want any shots getting through." The EWO confirmed that the four nearest weapons platforms had been targeted and, at his commander's nod, the first four attack squads of fifteen ships lanced forwards.

Much to the wing commander's surprise, not one shot emerged from the cylindrical satellites as the Knife-ships swept in. Each squad leader and his or her seconds opened fire, a lance of ionised particles racing towards their target which exploded without the slightest indication of shielding or armour. With a frown, the wing commander ordered the rest of his forward squads to begin their attack.

"_They aren't even trying to fight!_" exulted one squad leader over the force-wide communications frequency. Within less than two minutes, the sky was filled with explosions as satellites were blown to pieces. There was no apparent sign of return fire. Could it be that these devices were unarmed? Were they nothing but a bluff?

The wing commander shook his head. Nothing could be gained by speculation without data. He turned to his pilot, ordering him to send the signal to the fleet that the enemy gun platforms were destroyed. Behind the slowly-regrouping Knife-ships, the main fleet emerged from hyperspace, an awesome sight by any standards. "_Commander_," General Bludgorje's voice echoed in the wing commander's communications headset, "_Commence your attack against ground-based defences._"

The wing commander confirmed his orders and the Knife-ships began their screaming descent towards the atmosphere as the War Destroyers formed up to blast the manned space platform out of existence.

Then, the lead squads of Knife-ships suddenly crumpled and exploded as if they had run into an invisible wall.

"All ships! Pull up!" the wing commander shouted. "There is a planetary defence shield!"

The EWO looked desperately at her sensor read outs. "I don't detect any shield generator satellites sir! How can that be?"

"They must be jamming our sensors," the wing commander snapped in reply as the Knife-ships fell back and re-formed again.

"But sir, if they are jamming us then they must be expecting us and that means..."

"A trap..." the wing commander said. His face twisted into a rictus-like snarl. He _knew_ this had been too easy. "All squads fall back towards the fleet and take up a defensive posture!"

"General! We are reading thirty-plus enemy capital ships emerging from behind the natural satellite!"

"On screen!" Bludgorje roared in fury. The main display screens showed the approaching ships - unknown in configuration and somewhat clumsy and ugly by the standards of most races. They were painted dull metallic grey and were extremely angular in construction. However, the fact that they were here indicated to the Lowardian commander that this 'simple pacification' might have some unplanned wrinkles. "Redeploy the fleet for maximum mutual protection," he ordered. "Have the escorts move out into flanking position and prepare them to commence high-speed torpedo runs against the enemy force!"

He saw the first squads of the Knife-fighters moving into a protective formation around his big ships. He also saw waves of grey-painted X-shaped fighters with weapons batteries mounted in their wing-tips sweeping towards them from the natural satellite. The fighters began to spit blue-white blasts of plasma at the fleet, agilely dodging in between the defensive fire being put up by the escorts.

Doomfyre looked up from his own station with a worried expression. "General, further enemy fighters are deploying from the planet's surface."

Bludgorje cursed. "Put a volley onto that space platform!" he ordered. A blinding series of green-white meson blasts flashed out from the dreadnoughts' turrets towards the half-complete space platform and... splashed uselessly against a previously-invisible shield. "Sensors?"

"That was a planetary-level shield, sir," the sensor specialist replied. "Strong enough to repel any except the most concentrated attack."

Bludgorje nodded. Oh, his opposite number was good, alright. With the enemy capital ships a looming threat, it would be impossible to direct said concentrated fire against any target without giving the enemy the chance to attack freely from another vector. "Order the Knife-ships to close with the enemy fighters. Once they have dealt with those annoyances, they are to begin to engage the enemy capital..." There was an explosion on the screen. "What in the name of the Emperor's blood was that?"

"The enemy have strike vessels mixed in with their space-superiority dogfighters," Doomfyre reported. "They are attacking our escorts. One has just lost shields and is reporting damage to its propulsion sec..." the report was cut off as said escort suddenly started to tear itself apart from the aft forward as the artificial black hole that was its power source suddenly lost containment.

_

* * *

_

"YEE-HAH!" 15-year-old Joss Possible screamed in joy as her XF/A-308 Crusader starfighter led a squadron of its kind away from the dying Lowardian scout. "Okay, Greys! Tighten up that formation and let's hit the next target! Remember to stay away from those dreadnoughts and watch for enemy fighters!"

_Joss's ECM panel shrieked a warning and she looked up to see over a dozen of the dagger-shaped enemy fighters moving in. "Grey Squad, break and engage those enemy fighters!" she commanded. "Watch for any turrets and keep your eyes open for missiles!"_

* * *

Bludgorje snarled and looked at the master tactical plot again. The enemy capital ships were spreading out to form an umbrella-like cordon formation, herding the Lowardian force against the planet, closer to the space platform. "Consolidate the fleet and pull the escorts in to covering station around the main body. Concentrate all fire from secondary turrets on the enemy fighters," he commanded. "Disregard the enemy capital ships for now. They will not engage us at this time - they are here to try to stop us from escaping."

"Escaping from what?" Doomfyre responded. "Those fighters are powerful but not nearly strong enough to penetrate our large ships' shields.

"They are buying time," Bludgorje remarked. "For what, I do not care to find out. Order all heavy ships to concentrate fire from their primary turrets on a point on the planetary shields directly over the closest population centre. Once we have beaten a hole through the shields, put a city-killer missile through the gap and continue to repeat for every population centre in range. We'll see how well these primitives' discipline and morale holds up as we start to slaughter their non-combatants by the tens of millions."

_

* * *

_

_Dr. James Possible stood in the ops centre of the space station_ Freedom _and looked at the battle taking place outside. He had no illusions about the ability of the hastily-developed fleet to take on the Lowardians' far more mature technology in the long run. That made his brilliant twin sons' work so important. He sighed as he looked around the place of his dreams and felt bitterness at the existence of the warlike aliens. "I had designed all this for peaceful research," he thought. "Damn this universe for not letting that be enough." He spoke out loud to Jim and Tim, who were crowded around a system display. "Boys?"_

_"We're ready..."_

_"To show those blue-..."_

_"Skinned freaks what..."_

_"Humans can do, Dad!"_

_Dr. Possible couldn't help grin a little at Jim and Tim's twin-speak. He then frowned as he saw the enemy ships firing on the planetary shield that Drew Lipsky had back-engineered from the Lowardians' own technology and knew that his time was up. Billions of lives now depended on his decisions. "Okay, boys. Do me proud. Fire the Super-Accelerator."_

* * *

The battle, in Bludgorje's opinion, had reached a stalemate. The enemy fighters were proving formidable foes, having destroyed two escorts and were accounting for Knife-ships at a rate of three for every one of their own lost. However, he was confident in an eventual victory. Eventually, his dreadnoughts' firepower being directed at the planet would force the enemy capital ships in closer. Once they were destroyed, he could focus his attention on pounding down the planet's defences, both active and passive, and get on with the conquest. "Maybe High Command might even give me that promotion I've been after," he mused to himself.

Doomfyre looked at his sensor displays in some confusion. "General," he reported. "There is a power surge coming from the lower appendage of the enemy space... CHAOS'S FLAMES!!!"

A spear of golden white fire shot from an articulated mount containing what had seemed to be some kind of plasma vent at the bottom of the space platform. The blast struck one of the dreadnoughts and _burned right through its shields_, tearing into the two-kilometre-long starship without any perceptible loss of power. The dreadnought, able to overcome any five of the mightiest ships of any known race, was instantly blown into metallic confetti in an enormous explosion that briefly rivalled the system's sun.

"What in the name of all the Gods was that?" Bludgorje demanded.

"Unidentified resonant-phase accelerated plasma weapon!" the Sensor officer responded. "Energy profile is comparable to the total output of a star! Sir, our shields cannot possibly repel firepower of that magnitude!"

Bludgorje stared in horror at the innocuous-looking space platform. "What are these creatures?" he demanded. "Demons from the inferno?" He shook his head. "All ships, close with the enemy capital ships and engage at point-blank range!"

"Sir?" Doomfyre was surprised at this change in tactics from his normally-conservative commander.

"That _thing_ will not dare to fire if we are too close to friendly ships! We need to take the offensive _now_!"

_

* * *

_

"Captain, they are moving towards us," the sensor officer reported.

_Kim nodded. "Engineer: Divert auxiliary power to the shields," she ordered. "Guns: Stand by on forward main batteries and missile launchers. Concentrate all fire on the target's forward shields and do not fire missiles until they are at point-blank range."_

_Kim sat down on her seat at the front of the bridge of the cruiser_ Prometheus _and strapped herself down. The 21-year-old woman tried to show a confidence that, in her heart, she was having a hard time feeling. "Okay people," she ordered. "It's show time."_

_

* * *

_

"BOOYAH!" Ron Stoppable cried in glee as two enemy fighters fell in quick succession to his fast gunnery. "Who says video games are no use in real life? Okay, Red boys, let's form up and see if we can't sneak through that dreadnought's shields! I'll be they won't be so hot on fighting our big hitters if they have to worry about a swarm of bugs trying to nibble 'em to death! Let's do it!"

_As the swarm of Crusaders dived towards the oncoming dreadnought, desperately trying to avoid being swatted by a nearly-solid wall of flak from its light meson weapons, Ron grinned like a blood-crazed monkey. "Still got your back, KP," he said to himself._

_

* * *

_

"Oh, heck, not good. So not good!" Joss was dodging as best as she could but this particular alien pilot was the best yet. He had already taken down three of her squad mates and was looking to make her hide #4 for his wall. "Grey Lead; Could use some..." At that moment, the green energy bolts shot towards Joss' fighter and the girl closed her eyes, idly wondering how much being exploded from flash-boiled bodily fluids hurt.

_The explosion was big, but the fact that it wasn't Joss's fighter doing the exploding was a notable difference from the teenage fighter jock's expectation._

_"Head's up, Rawhide! That's one you owe me!" laughed the pilot of the XF-302 Rapier space-superiority fighter. Even if Joss hadn't recognised the woman's voice, the fighter's distinctive green-and-black custom paint-job, contrasting with the usual low-visibility grey of almost every other fighter, immediately identified her._

_"Great," Joss muttered as she directed her fighter back into the fray. "Not only do I need to get my ass saved, I have to get it saved by Cousin Kim's arch-rival!"_

_With a feral scream, General Shego directed her starfighter into the biggest concentration of Lowardian fighters she could see and began firing at every target that presented itself to her._

* * *

The commander of the Lowardian dreadnought _Fangs of Nemesis_ cursed as the Human warship, a strangely attractive vessel resembling a predatory fish with a tall vertical structure at the very aft extending above and below the centreline, dodged away from his guns' heavy fire. "Communications," she ordered. "Tell the escorts to herd them back towards our forward quarter and... _Death's spite!"_ The Lowardian female hissed in fury as the agile Human vessel raked the small escort ship to the upper flank of her command with those freakishly powerful plasma accelerator beam cannon and followed this up with a volley from their pulse turrets that left the escort a blazing wreck. For a few moments, the enemy capital ship was out of range, dodging behind the other escort, which clearly came out worse from the encounter.

"Ma'am, we are taking damage from the enemy fighters' attacks. They are tracking down our engine plume to get past our shields..."

"Don't bother me with trivia, idiot! Tell the gunners to target all their firepower on those fighters. Once they are _swatted_ I want that cruiser destroyed!"

* * *

"_Captain our fighters are taking heavy losses!"_

_Ron... Kim shook her head. She had to focus. "Then let's give the blue-skins something else to worry about. Target tubes ten through fifteen on the dreadnought and fire!"_

_..._

"Ma'am! I have six anti-ship missiles on approach!"

"Re-target secondary turrets on those missiles!"

…

_"All ahead full! Stand by all forward batteries! Fire on my command!"_

…

"They're coming right for us!"

"EVADE! IN THE EMPEROR'S NAME **EVADE**!!!"

…

"_FIRE!!!_"

_The_ Prometheus_' phased plasma beam cannon lashed out, slashing against the huge dreadnought's forward shields, which promptly collapsed from the localised overload. Powerful electro-plasma pulse cannon spat out from the agile human warship, the first designed by James Possible when he realised the threat facing his homeworld from the stars. White-hot hammer-blows of super-heated gas punched holes in the armoured hide of the Fangs of Nemesis, making the 2,000-meter-long starship shudder and wallow from the transmitted force._

_In the confusion, the Lowardian gunners did not notice the quartet of human attack ships until they each fired a pair of torpedoes into the huge armoured dome around the dreadnought's power centre._

_Rather than continue on a reciprocal course, Kim ordered her ship to turn radially away from the enemy ship, bringing her rear main batteries into play and leaving the Lowardian gunners shooting at where the_ Prometheus _should have been rather than where it currently_ was_. Lances of plasma lashed out and punched into the damaged armour around the power centre._

_..._

_"Get clear Red boys! She's gonna blow!" Ron led his surviving fighters away from the enemy ship as its power centre turned into an enormous explosion, which quickly spread down its length._

_"Spankin!" Kim said as she looked at the enemy ship disintegrate on her view-screen. "Okay, helm, I've had enough with tangling with the defensive line out here. Plot me a high-speed course towards the assault ships and stand by on our anti-ship missile launchers!"_

_

* * *

_

"Open fire," James Possible said expressionlessly. The golden-white spear of his sons' most intentionally destructive creation lashed out again and struck one of the huge ships shaped like an alligator that Vivian's scans identified as a probable troop ship. As with the previous two attacks, the blast matched resonance with the target's shields and ploughed right through turning the ship, and over 250,000 of the Empire's finest ground troops, into an enormous bloom of flame.

_"Doctor, we are reading enemy fighters closing on us," Vivian Porter reported from the main sensor station. "It looks like they are going to try to fly through our shields."_

_James nodded. "Transfer power to the secondary turrets," he ordered. _

* * *

Bludgorje was now coming to terms with the fact that High Command had _grossly_ underestimated these creatures. At the very best, he was expecting to lose maybe two thirds of his force in this engagement. Indeed, there was a very real possibility that no warrior under his command would survive this day...

Of course... that blow was made a bit sweeter by the fact that, by the Gods, this was a _glorious_ battle! These Humans were worthy foes indeed and he hoped that their final defeat would be one that would inspire the warriors of the Empire for ages to come!

On his view-screen, he watched as one of the larger human warships, a strange flattened design with a distinctive flattened command hull to the fore, a pair of what seemed to be hanger pods either side of the main spine and a large engine section to the rear, crumple under the fire of the _Terror of Ages _guns. Fire belched out of the breaches in the other ship's hull and Bludgorje nodded in satisfaction, his face expressionless. "Sensors, find me another target," he ordered.

"Enemy battlecruiser and cruiser approaching on vector two-one-nine, General," the Sensor officer barked.

"Target them with main turrets! Have the _Death Blossom_ close up to support us from the flank!"

_

* * *

_

"Okay Gold group, you're clear to commence your run!" Joss signalled the commander of a squad of the heavily built XA-307 Avenger torpedo bombers. "Greys, let's fall back and cover their butts!"

...

_"Fire tubes ten through fifteen and one-oh-five through one-ten," Dr. Director ordered on the bridge of her flagship, the_ Daedelus_. "Transfer auxiliary power to forward shields but stand by to transfer them back to energy weapons on my command."_

* * *

The explosion that marked the destruction of the appropriately-named _Death Blossom_ rocked everyone on the flag bridge of the _Terror of Ages_.

Despite himself, Bludgorje was impressed. Somehow, these so-called 'primitives' had learnt how to use advanced weapons and to do so in combinations that could defeat most countermeasures. A combination of attacking fighters to wear down shields and distract the sensors of close-range guns, followed up by missiles and then, finally, powerful energy weapons to blow holes through every bit of damage the missiles could cause was deadly. "What I want to know," the Lowardian flag officer mused to himself, "is where they learnt these skills! It is almost as if their entire generation had been brought up playing games and watching entertainment vids that showed effective starship combat tactics!"

_

* * *

_

_Dr. Director nodded in satisfaction as the leftmost dreadnought succumbed to a hail of fire from the_ Daedelus _and its consort, the cruiser_ Hercules_. "Helm, plot a reciprocal course past that remaining dreadnought. Guns, as we pass, rake them with all turrets and then switch fire to those escorts and assault ships."_

* * *

His face a rictus of rage, Bludgorje watched as two assault ships were quickly blown into lifeless debris by one of the enemy warships. It was even one of the smaller enemy cruiser-class ships, by Chaos's Flames! Whoever that commander was, they clearly knew the way of the warrior: the effective application of minimum, precise force was far better than all the bludgeoning force in the galaxy.

"Doomfyre, I want that ship," he snarled. "Ignore all the other hostiles for now, the other heavy ships can handle them."

Doomfyre nodded, his skin pale with stress. He chose not to tell his commander that only two other dreadnoughts and a half-dozen escorts were still operational - what difference would it make at this stage? He noticed something. "Sir... we are picking up message traffic from the target ship."

"And?" Bludgorje asked. It was unlike his second to bring intelligence matters up in the middle of battle.

"Sir, the ship is identified as the _Prometheus_ and its commander as a Captain Kim Possible."

Bludgorje grinned evilly. "Belay that previous command, Captain," he snarled. "Bring down that ship's shields and get them with all our grappling beams. I will personally lead the assault force over to capture that ship. Perhaps," he added with a smirk, "seeing me with my hand around the throat of their champion will convince the humans of the futility of resistance."

_

* * *

_

"Captain, we're losing shields!"

_"Get us out of here, helm!"_

_"We're caught in their tractor beams, Ma'am. I can't get us moving!"_

_Kim snarled, partly in anger and partly in fear. She couldn't divert power from the shields to the guns to knock out the enemy's tractor emitters. "Call for assistance," she commanded._

_..._

_"Dr. Director, we can't get close to the_ Prometheus_," the_ Daedelus_' first officer announced. "The enemy have pulled in all their surviving ships and are blocking us from getting close to the ship attacking her!"_

...

_"Dad, Kim's in trouble."_

_"I see that boys. Felix, can we fire on that enemy ship?"_

_"I'm sorry sir, but the _Prometheus_ is too close. She'll be caught in the explosion."_

_..._

_"KP!" Ron's thoughts were chaotic with fear as he saw his fiancée's ship bathed in the blue light of tractor beams, a continual hail of meson blasts quickly wearing down her shields. "No! I won't let you hurt her!"_

_"Red Lead! Where are you going?" Ron did not hear his wingman's query. All he could hear was Kim's voice pleading for help... and the screams of ten thousand, million monkeys..._

* * *

Bludgorje looked on in satisfaction as his ship's main guns pounded down the enemy's shields. The process was taking a little longer than usual due to the requirement to capture the ship rather than blast it to smithereens. However... "Sir," Doomfyre announced. "The enemy ship's shields have failed."

"Target their engines and guns," the General commanded mildly. "Stand by to deploy boarding arms. Remind the assault leaders that I want their commander _alive_."

"Sir! Incoming!"

Bludgorje looked up to see one of the enemy's strike fighters streaking right at his flagship. He didn't see the reason for concern until he realised that the little X-shaped ship was surrounded by a fiery blue nimbus of energy that _seemed to resemble a tailed bipedal tree-dwelling creature of some sort...!_ "What in all the stars is that?" he muttered. "All secondaries target that fighter! I don't want it getting through!"

To Bludgorje's horror, energy blasts capable of laying waste to entire city blocks seemed to flow across the blue energy field like water! No ship that size could mount shields of that power! What was this? "Retarget primary batteries and ion lances!" he ordered. "Destroy that ship!"

"Too late!" Doomfyre shouted.

The fighter did not fire its weapons. No, it rammed into the twenty-meter-thick frontal armour of the _Terror of Ages_... and punched through like it was a thin sheet of tissue paper. Travelling at full power, the fighter tore the length of the giant dreadnought, ripping through bulkheads, power conduits, computer bays, weapons stores and various compartments. Explosive decompression caused whole sections of the giant ship to implode and huge thunderbolts of blue energy lashing out in all directions from the fighter caused enormous explosions to rip other sections apart.

The last thing that Bludgorje saw was the fighter explode out of the forward bulkhead of the flag bridge, blazing with blue-white light, thunderbolts lashing out in all directions. The last thing that he heard was the screams, whoops and hollers of countless wild beasts like the chorus of the Gods...

_

* * *

_

Betty Director watched in amazement as the enemy flagship seemed to crumple in on itself from one end to the other, explosions spreading across its length. The giant warship's engines stuttered and died. Then a Crusader attack fighter, shining blue white with an energy field shaped like a... a... a... _**Monkey **__exploded out of the back of the warship and flew off into the night, its impossible energy field fading as it did so. _

_The bridge of the _Daedelus_ dissolved into cheers and yells of victory as the enemy flagship rolled, out of control, into a death dive towards the Earth before colliding with the planetary shields and exploding in an enormous ball of fire._

_"The Ron Factor strikes again," Betty murmured with a smile. "Well done, Stoppable."_

_Another blast shot from the _Freedom_ consuming the last surviving Lowardian dreadnought and, as Betty watched, the last surviving troopship and three escorts opened amber-coloured hyperspace vortexes and escaped. One last escort hung in space, caught between a half-dozen UNDF warships and was quickly pounded into a cloud of flame and debris. _

_..._

_James Possible looked at the _Prometheus_, his first starship and the one to which he entrusted the safety of his Kimmie-cub and sighed in relief when he saw that the powerful little ship was battered but intact._

_"It's over," he thought in relief. "No," he realised. "No, in fact, it has only begun."_

* * *

Betty Director sat in her ready room behind the bridge of the _Daedelus_, looking through the reports sent to her by her various commanders. The post-battle reckoning was hard. Six of the human warships had been destroyed outright and another twelve were so badly damaged that they would be out of service for over a month for repairs. Over _two thirds _of the combined fighter force had been lost.

"_I hope you realise that this has achieved nothing, sister dear,_" Sheldon Director, aka Gemini, gloated from his place at the underground command bunker known as NORAD. "The Lowardians are warriors. Now we have shown them that we are a threat, they will return to try again. Next time it will be in greater numbers and with far greater force."

"And what would you have me do, Sheldon?" Betty snapped at her twin brother. "Surrender and pray that they are gentle slave-masters?"

Long accustomed to his sister's moods, Gemini merely quirked an eyebrow. "_I expect you to continue to do the right thing, Elizabeth,_" he replied. "_After all, there is no other choice open to us. I merely needed to confirm that you had the strength needed to do what had to be done._"

The one-eyed director of Global Justice blew out an annoyed breath. "Never doubt that," she declared. "Sheldon... pass on my compliments... and my thanks... to Drakken and Dementor. If it were not for their back-engineering of the Lowardians' technology, this would not have been a victory."

"_Victory?_" Gemini asked. "_This was not a victory, my dear, naive sister. The Lowardian War has begun and with it a dark shadow has fallen over our civilisation. I doubt any of our generation will live to see the light of peace again._"

Betty was still glaring at the view-screen that had carried her brother's image five minutes later when her aide signalled her on the intra-ship intercom. "Dr. Director, Captain Possible and Commander Stoppable are here."

Betty looked up from her desk and the post-battle reports. "Send them in, Lieutenant," she ordered.

She looked up as Team Possible entered. Both were in surprisingly good condition, considering what they had just been through. Kim was sporting a dressing on her forehead that suggested she had been cut by flying debris of the similar. Ron looked like he had sweated off a few pounds during the fierce fighter-vs-fighter battles and had black shadows of exhaustion under his eyes.

"Kimberly, Ronald," Betty said. "Well done, well done to the both of you. There were so many heroes here today, but you both deserve special recognition."

"Ah, its' no big," Kim replied with a slight blush. "What, blowing up invading aliens and keeping your ship in one piece? Anyone could do it!"

"Yeah, there's no need to thank me for keeping my hide intact and running distraction for my bon-diggity fiancée!" Ron added. "That's something the Ron-man is good at!"

Betty smiled at the pair's usual demurring of any thanks. "You are too modest," she replied. "You have survived something that few others of your age have and have done so remarkably intact." Before Kim could reply, Betty interrupted her. "Now, I haven't called you here to thank you or even decorate you, although you can be sure that the latter _is_ coming your way. I have new orders for you both."

"In other words, you've called us here to punish us," Ron said with a grimace. Betty laughed. Yes, that was the right way to view this.

"Ma'am, the _Prometheus _will need at least one week in dry-dock to replace her shield generators and resupply, let alone replace the eighteen pilots we lost from our fighter group," Kim protested. "Sending us out on another mission now, especially if contact with the enemy is expected, would be very risky."

"Well, unfortunately, Earth's strategic situation does not allow us the luxury of waiting until our units are fully ready before deploying them." Kim did not subside, and Betty approved of that attitude. No good commander was happy in taking her people out on a suicide mission. "However, the problems with the _Prometheus_ are not your concern any more. I'm transferring you over to the _Odyssey_. Ronald, you will be replacing the _Odyssey_'s CAG, who died during the battle."

Kim frowned and tried to remember the fleet assignment charts that she had seen during the past few months. The _Odyssey _was one of the largest and most powerful of her father's amazing starship designs, one of the battleship/carrier hybrids that Felix laughingly called a 'Battlestar'. "Ma'am, I thought that the _Odyssey _was Will Du's ship?"

Betty sighed. "I'm afraid that Captain Du was... incapacitated during the battle," she replied.

"He wasn't hurt was he?" Kim tried to feel sorry for the snobbish and arrogant former GJ agent but was finding it hard.

"Not physically," Betty replied. "Despite his first-class organisational mind, it seems that Will was not suited for a combat deployment."

"He froze up," Ron guessed.

Betty nodded. "Unofficially, yes. Officially, he is suffering from mental and emotional stress as a result of the battle and will be reassigned to a ground station where his skills can be better used. In the meantime, you two have your own assignments." Betty turned on her view-screen and turned it around so Kim and Ron could see the display. "Our analysis of the navigational data in the computers of the Lowardian ships have shown that they staged from a forward outpost in the 30 Erandi system, just 32 light years from Earth. In order to buy us further time to re-arm and build up our forces, your orders are to proceed to 30 Erandi and destroy the enemy outpost with Horizon strategic attack missiles. Once you have completed your primary mission, your battle group will begin a combat patrol of the surrounding systems. You are authorised to engage any enemy shipping or fixed surface or space facility you encounter, within your discretion as fleet commander. Beyond that, you will assemble whatever intelligence you can gather to help us gain a clearer picture of the disposition of enemy forces in this sector of space."

Kim's mouth went dry, her mind focussed on one salient fact. "Ma'am, _one _Horizon could reduce a land area the size of Colorado to fused volcanic glass. You referred to them in plural."

"Yes. Your ships will be carrying a full war-load, Kimberley, including ten Horizons as well as Catchalot surface attack missiles." The one eyed former intelligence chief looked at her young protege sadly. "They would not have hesitated to do that to our world, Kimberley," Betty said quietly. "If we intend to survive as a free race, then we have to be willing to do whatever it takes to fight back. If we deprive the Lowardians of their forward operating locations and disrupt their ability to supply and operate their forces in our part of the galaxy, then it will take them longer to concentrate their forces to attack us and will buy us more time to make our own preparations."

Kim swallowed. "I understand, Ma'am," she said quietly.

"Can I rely on you, Kimberly? Ronald? You are both young and there is no shame in..."

"Ma'am, we can do the job," Ron cut in. "We both know what the stakes are."

Betty nodded. "Thank you, Ronald. We will be replacing the attrition losses in your new fighter wing with survivors from other squads including your old ones on the _Prometheus_. The _Odyssey_ will be accompanied by her sister ship, the battlecruiser _Apollo _and the new heavy cruisers _Repulse _and _Zheng-Hi_, as well as the logistical transport _Yankee Clipper_. You will be in overall command of the force, Kimberly. Of course, this assignment brings with it the automatic promotion to the rank of Commodore."

Kim's jaw dropped open. "The youngest flag officer in the fleet," Ron said with a grin, clapping a hand onto her shoulder. "The bon-diggity prettiest too!"

Kim blushed and Betty grinned. "I wouldn't have asked this of you if I didn't think you were able to do it, Kimberly. I know that this is an enormous weight for one so young but we are desperate. This is a struggle we cannot lose because there is no middle ground with this enemy. Either we win or we face extinction or perpetual slavery and I'm not sure which possibility terrifies me more."

Kim raised her chin defiantly, all nervousness and fear forgotten. "You can count on us, Ma'am. We won't let you down." Ron's confirmation of that assurance brought a bitter smile to Dr. Director's face.

"We are still re-supplying the _Odyssey_," the newly-minted commander of the United Nations Defence Forces announced quietly. "Take a few days to see your families and friends. There will be little enough chance for that in the months and years to come."

After bidding farewell to the two young heroes, Betty Director did not return to her work. Instead she went to the window of her ready room and looked out at her homeworld stretched out below her. When she had first seen this sight, she had been awed by its beauty. Now, all she could see was the vulnerability and the billions of lives now in her hands. Like Gemini, she found herself wondering whether any of them would ever see the light of peace dawning again in their lifetimes.


	3. When Tomorrow Comes

**Sitches Aplenty**

A Repository of KP Shorts

**Disclaimer**

Kim Possible and the characters and situations of the Kim Possible universe were created by Mark McCorkle and Bob Schooley for the Disney Channel and are the copyright of the Walt Disney Corporation. This is a non-profit fan work for free distribution through the world-wide web. No breach of trademark or copyright is intended.

**Author's Notes**

This is going to be a series of short stories where I take Kim Possible, her friends and her enemies places dictated by my own imagination. These short stories are not part of any larger continuity and will only be linked if I specifically say so in my introductory notes.

Censor: T – Just for safety's sake

Another change in atmosphere and theme. Join Shego in a trip eight years into the future and witness the beginning of the next generation of Team Possible.

Amethyst 'Amy' Goh is loosely based on a character created by author Commander Argus.

**3. When Tomorrow Comes**

If there was any single thing guaranteed to make Sherylin Goh, _alias _Shego, fly into a rage, it would be to describe her little girl as a 'mistake'.

Oh, beyond any shadow of a doubt, little Amy wasn't a _planned_ child. That brief fling with an old acquaintance heading through town on his way to somewhere else certainly was _not_ intended to result in a child. However, as Shego's own life bore ample testimony, the unexpected can and usually does eventually happen and, besides, even the best contraceptives are not totally reliable.

The alien attack had left scars on her and the entire world that were not always obvious and certainly were not automatically visible. Shego found that she was left with the uncomfortable feeling that her life, for all its excitement, was not as happy or as fulfilling as she had hoped it would be. She was also left with a question: If I had died out there, what would have I left behind? Certainly, there were those who would have remembered her but it would have mostly been as an enemy or a threat. Suddenly, Shego realised that infamy isn't quite the mark she wanted to leave on this world.

So, what would she do? She certainly wouldn't be rejoining Team Go or starting her own hero operation (the way that the Princess was apparently planning on doing). To her, that was simply substituting one type of infamy for another. Suddenly, after a lifetime of wandering, Shego suddenly found a need and desire for roots and structure to her life. She wanted to have friends, neighbours and a family. She wanted to be able to call one place 'home' for more than a few weeks in a row. She wanted… Hell, she wanted to be able to have a life that didn't involve having her butt kicked all over a lair by the Princess or nearly being turned into a shish-kabob by the Sidekick's freaky glowing sword every month or so.

Oddly enough, this seismic decision did not cause as much a ruckus with her employer as she had feared. In truth, Drakken was feeling his forty years just as much as Shego was feeling her twenty-eight. He admitted that Dementor's taunts after Drakken's investiture into the Legion of Merit at the UN had struck home with unexpected force. He _had_ always been a failure as a would-be world conqueror and he realised now that this was because, ultimately, his heart had not been in it. Oh, the _technical challenge_ of finding a method to conquer the world was attractive but, as he admitted that drunken night, he didn't have the first clue what he would do if he had ever succeeded. No, overall, he felt that it was time to complete his doctorates in physics and electronics and then take up Dr. Director on her offer of a place in Global Justice's R&D section, including the mother lode of helping back-engineer captured Lowardian technology.

It was the next night that Shego ran across Commander Neil Argus as she wandered the UN building. She had been waiting out her semi-exile on the diplomatically neutral turf until Betty Director's global pardon (reward for the help she gave in the fight against the Lowardians) finished its protracted navigation through various court systems around the world. Neil was a good guy – fun, friendly and _great_ in the sack. Shego really needed that level of distraction at that point. However, he wasn't ever what she would regard as husband material. Like a lot of naval aviators, he was too much of a wanderer at heart and she knew that any attempt to tie him down for too long would inevitably lead to disaster. Still, that fortnight-long affair was enjoyable enough, including several night-clubs and parties that helped Shego temporarily forget the questions about her future.

Soon after this, Shego decided to decline Dr. Director's offer of a position with Global Justice, either as a field agent or an instructor at the agency's academy. More of the same, just in a different uniform, was not something that classified a 'fresh start' in her book. Much to her surprise, the head of GJ did _not_ lock her away and throw away the key, no matter how clearly annoyed she was with Shego's decision.

So… what next? Shego began to wander the continental United States, feeling at a loose end and realising, much to her surprise, that she had no idea _who_ she was and _what _she wanted in her life. Since she acquired her plasma field powers when she was just 15 years old, Shego's life had been just a long series of fights and scenes from a comic book. She had never been given the time to decide what kind of adult life she wanted. Hell, in her darker moments she conceded that she had never really had the chance to be an _adult _in any meaningful way. She had no job, few legally-accessible assets (one of the terms of GJ's pardon was that all of her assets would be seized and assessed to see if any were illegally acquired) and no home.

Almost without any conscious direction to her movements, Shego found herself back in Middleton, Colorado. The town had suffered heavily during the Lowardian attack but she was surprised and pleased to see the rebuilding work so far advanced after just a few months. Much to Shego's surprise, she found that she was fairly anonymous there. Several things aided her in this objective. Firstly, the town was filled with FEMA staff and troops – what was one new face amongst thousands? Secondly, the Princess and the Sidekick had left for college (Go City University, ironically enough) and the Princess' twin terror kid brothers had been packed off to a private school for gifted youngsters. All Shego had to do was steer clear of the Space Centre and the Neurosurgical Unit at the Medical Centre and no one would ever know who she really was… or, rather, _used_ to be.

After a few brief flirtations with work at some store, Shego found herself at the main entrance to the High School. Although Shego was an infamous and recently-pardoned super-criminal, _Sherylin Goh_ had a Master's Degree in English and a well-rounded classical education. She also had a work history there as a temporary relief teacher for a few weeks (although the memory of syrupy, submissive 'Miss Go' still made her stomach churn). She did not find it too difficult to convince Steve Barkin to give her a chance. Although the thought of spending five days out of seven around a group of whiny, self-obsessed and noisy teenagers was somewhat horrifying, she found that she quite enjoyed keeping the little terrors in line. It was as much fun as terrifying a fresh bunch of HenchMen! She also found, much to her surprise, that she found teaching rewarding. The look of awe on a whole class of faces as she brought to life the climactic events of Charles Dickens' _Oliver Twist_ at the end of the first week decided her on sticking this one out.

During the next four years, Shego found herself laying down roots for the first time in over a decade. She was hardly a social butterfly. People still looked strangely at the exotic woman with skin that looked _green_ (could she be one of the _aliens_?) and there was always the risk of running into a former victim or two. In any case, she wasn't exactly interested in becoming a part of the garage sale and garden party set. However, she got used to the guy who owned the local store and even learnt the name of the kid who did the paper round on the street where she had acquired a house (at a low cost thanks to the previous inhabitants wishing to flee before the aliens returned). Wearing fake corrective lenses and with her hair scooped back with a hair-band, Shego even was able to visit the Medical Centre several times and have Dr. Anne Possible walk past her without a flicker of recognition!

The real test was when the Princess and Sidekick returned from college. The simple solution that Shego used was simply to stay out of their way. However, that wasn't as easy as she initially hoped it would be. One thing that Shego never expected was for the Sidekick to be the one with the drive to get ahead. Within a few weeks, a new restaurant had opened up in central Middleton, in between the covered mall and the old Main Street. _Cuisine International_ started small but Shego soon learnt that it was _the_ place to eat – a gastronomic experience second to none – and, abruptly, Middleton became a place for the A-List from both coasts to come, if only to enjoy the work of Chef Ron of the five quickly-won Michelin stars. Any date Shego had from that day on would almost inevitably suggest the Cuisine International as a venue and it would take a lot of fast-talk on her part to find an excuse to go somewhere else.

Where was the Princess in all of this? Shego wondered if her old arch-foe had maybe chosen (improbably enough) to become Suzy Homemaker. Six months after her arch-rival's return, she was disabused of this notion when she saw the half-page advertisements in the local news-sheets, the _Middleton Times _and the more down-market _Triton Mercantile_. The Princess had always liked helping people and it seems that she had chosen to do so by opening a legal practice, shades of Erin Brockovich, that offered low-cost help and representation.

Shego remembered her smirk when she made the connection between Stoppable Associates and the Princess, realising that, sometime during the past three years, the Sidekick had finally popped the question (not that this had ever been in any realistic doubt). She wasn't too surprised not to have heard about their nuptials. After all, she had been actively _avoiding_ the Possible family and, in any case, she hadn't been exactly likely to be the Princess' choice for Maid of Honour.

A few months later came the Princess' first big coup and several revelations.

Firstly, it appears that Stoppable Associates had suddenly become Stoppable-Rockwaller Associates. Shego knew that second name from somewhere – Junior's old squeeze from a few years back, if she remembered correctly. If so, then whilst the two were schoolyard rivals, they were definitely a legal partnership to be reckoned with. Their reputation amongst the town's legal vultures was that there was no secret that Kim Stoppable could not uncover, no matter how obscured the paper trail. Once that happened, Bonnie Rockwaller was the advocate that would tear out your throat on the witness stand with a smile and then dance on the grave of your reputation afterwards. Suddenly, the Princess's little operation wasn't just an idealistic mistake anymore – the girl actually had shown she had the wherewithal to make it work!

Secondly, the TV report on their triumph over a local industrial concern for polluting the water sources of several small farms included a brief shot of Kim hugging her husband and seeming oh-so-happy and _safe _there in his arms. Oh… and there was a definite _glow_ about the Princess that made Shego decide that she and the Sidekick had been _busy_.

Shego never exactly figured out why seeing the Princess getting sappy with the Sidekick inspired her to go out and get drunk. All she knew was that she felt incredibly lonely that night. It was thus a bit of unexpected luck to run into Commander Neil Argus again. The USN aviator was staying over in Middleton after flying in some high-level figure into the Space Centre to listen to Dr. James Possible and (of all people) Drew explain how they proposed to burn through $10 billion over the next few years… or something like that. Frankly, Shego wasn't particularly interested in what Neil was doing there.

It was a nicely diverting couple of days of partying and sex before Neil had to fly his bosses back to DC. For Shego, it was back to work to prepare for the end-of-semester tests at school. It was on the last day of that semester that the morning sickness started.

There was the usual mental tumult that many women in her position experienced. Denial came first: She _couldn't_ be pregnant! She used protection every time! Then came fear: What was she going to _do_? Then came anger: How _dare_ the little _brat_ come along when she was just getting her life in order? Finally, and most surprisingly to her, came acceptance.

In fact, she found this turn of luck surprisingly welcome. She had wanted a family, a _real_ family, for over 15 years now. Well, here was her chance. In any case, she knew that she could never have an abortion. She was able to kill if the need came, but she couldn't kill a child whose only sin was to have been unexpected and inconvenient.

Shego's greatest fears in the following months was, surprisingly, not directed at herself, at least not directly. Her greatest fear was that she didn't know how to be a mother. Oh, her birth mother was a wonderful woman, beyond a doubt, but she had left the family when Wendell and Wesley were still quite young. Shego remembered too little about her to give her any confidence she could learn any lessons to apply to herself. Besides, she was terrified of her powers and temper! She could _hurt_ a helpless baby in a moment of anger!

Her greatest fear was losing her job. Caring for a child was an expensive business. However, Middleton was a conservative town and the PTA might not want an unwed mother, especially one so overtly exotic as her, teaching their children. Surprisingly, it was not so. Oh, there were some puritans on the education board but her classes had some of the best grades in recent memory and Steve backed her to the hilt, bless him.

Nine months flew by and Shego became increasingly aware of the life growing in her. She actually ignited her powers (for the first time in months) when the baby kicked her for the first time and incinerated a perfectly good set of curtains in her living room. The ultrasound confirmed a little girl and, on an impulse, she chose the name 'Amethyst' or 'Amy' when not presenting her to maiden aunts or 'polite society'. For someone who hadn't drawn their first breath yet, Amy quickly became the centre of Shego's world. Suddenly, everything was seen and experienced through the prism of impending motherhood. She found herself blushing like a beacon one night after realising that she had spent hours recounting stories of Team Go's exploits to her unborn daughter whilst caressing her gravid belly.

Steve Barkin was a great help, as was his tough wife, Claire. She certainly would not have got the nursery set up as quickly as she had without Claire Barkin's clear thinking and would have forgotten a whole raft of important stuff.

Then the day came.

The doctor's warning that thirty-three years old was quite late to be having a first child was borne out by a _twenty-five _hour labour that had Shego in tears of frustration and hopeless pain towards the end. However, as she knelt, hung onto the nurse's hands and heard Amy's first cry protesting the cold and light of the outside world, she realised that this, her greatest ever battle, was over. Then, as she lay in her bed, Amy cuddled to her breast, exhausted and feeling an endorphin-edged peace, she realised that, in fact, the battle had only just begun. The love and bond she felt at that moment made her confident that she _could_ conquer the world… indeed, the whole _universe_, to make Amy happy.

Amy brought many changes to Shego's life. Steve could not hold the job open for her too long, so she found herself back at work at the High School when Amy was only four months old (something that made Stoppable-Rockwaller Associates' victory in forcing the City Council to provide crèche facilities for all city and county employees particularly welcome). The simple fact of breast-feeding in the crèche helped reduce her self-consciousness around others. Spending time with other mothers, both in ante-natal and post-natal clinics and also in various feeding rooms around town also helped her connect with her peer group.

Shego found herself falling back into her old routine of callisthenics, which had fallen by the wayside as her growing belly had made them essentially impossible. Partly, this was to work off the pregnancy blubber but also it was motivated by some half-instinctive need to be ready to protect her little girl.

Previously, Shego had an automatic 'escape plan' in position that would allow her to be packed and gone within a few hours of finding out that she was in danger. Amy suddenly massively complicated these plans. She would require sets of false papers for Amy as well as herself and would need a minimum of two extra bags for her daughter. Suddenly, she realised that the roots she had put down were a lot stronger and deeper than she thought. Oddly enough, though, she didn't feel trapped she felt… _comforted_ in a certain way, as if her sense of being 'home' had just been massively validated.

As Amy grew up (and God, that happened too quickly), Shego found an incredible delight in each milestone. The first time the baby responded to her mother's voice with clear recognition, the first babbling attempts words, the first fitful attempts to control her environment and the first attempts to crawl. These were all moments of joy to her. This was something that she had wanted all her life: a person and positive experiences that were uniquely and indivisibly her own. She had Amy, Amy had her and nothing would change that, _ever_.

Then was the day she had not expected but ought to have. Shego had been aware of Amy's fascination with the local wildlife but had not really put much thought to it until one day, shortly after Amy's second birthday. She had been away from Amy, who had been playing with some of her favourite cuddly toys in the living room, whilst she prepared her favourite tea. Shego had never moved so fast than when she heard her daughter scream, virtually flying through the door between the kitchen nook and living room, her fists ablaze with green energy and ready to rain death and destruction down on anyone and anything…

What she found was Amy, her bottom lip trembling in anguish, staring at a form crumpled on the rear patio by the open rear screen doors. Shego knelt and found that it was a sparrow of some kind. The creature had apparently been knocked out of the air by some bird of prey and was clearly breathing its last. Shego picked Amy up to comfort the girl only to have her daughter squirm to get out of her grip. "Help, mama! Help!" Amy cried pitifully.

"I'm sorry, Treasure, there's nothing mama can do," Shego murmured, kissing her daughter's velvety soft cheek and tasting tears.

"Help, mama!" Amy insisted, reaching out for the bloodied bird.

With a gasp, Shego nearly lost her grip on her daughter and had to lower her to the ground rather than let her fall. The little girl wobbled on her still-uncertain legs for a moment before striding over to the sparrow and dropping down into a cross-legged position in front of it. As Shego watched, Amy reached out to the creature. "Hey! Don't touch, kiddo! It's… dir… ty?"

Shego's voice fell away as she realised that Amy's hands were surrounded with a beautiful glow of energy. The glow was deepest royal purple, reflecting her daughter's unusually-coloured eyes. As Shego looked on, Amy touched the sparrow so lightly and, as if time were in reverse, its wounds healed up. As a gape-mouthed Shego looked on, the bird staggered to its feet and flew away.

"Bye…!" Amy murmured quietly before fainting back into her near-hysterical mother's arms.

At that very moment, Shego swore to God that no one would know of her daughter's gifts, not _ever_. No one would _ever_ force Amy to become 'Amgo' (yuck!) or try to make her feel obliged to help others. Given the way that Amy had fainted after her healing, Shego bet that too much usage of that power would injure her and she wasn't about to let that happen.

It wasn't until Amy was past her third birthday that Shego was able to talk to the little girl about what had happened that day. Amy didn't really understand what she had done. She knew that the 'birdie' was 'ouch-ing' and that she simply _knew_ how to make that go away (in the same way Shego just _knew_ how to 'light up' her plasma powers).

Shego made sure that Amy understood that she should not make someone's 'ouch' go away without first asking mama. She felt a little guilty at seeing Amy's clear disappointment but remained resolute, telling herself that, when she was older, she would let Amy make her own choices. For now, she had to protect her big-hearted daughter from exploitation. She also wondered if Amy's unusual and all-embracing empathy was a feature of her powers and, for the first time, cursed the way she had cut off contact with so many of her former associates in the superhuman community who might have been able to give her those answers.

One unfortunate consequence of this experience was that Amy became rather withdrawn and shy, only nervously and reluctantly interacting with the other pre-K kids and clearly feeling that she needed mama's approval to approach someone. On the other hand, the girl was very intelligent (as if Shego would allow anything else), having already picked up basic arithmetic skill and having a reading level that made the leader of the pre-K group use the word 'gifted'. _Sister, if you only knew the half of it!_ Shego told herself.

Yes, Shego was proud of Amy. However, if she had one fear, it was that, perhaps, a combination of gift and power might pass Shego's curse on to her and she might never really have any friends.

* * *

"Mama!" Amy ran out of the twin doors of North Middleton Kindergarten right into her mother's arms, her long, chestnut brown hair trailing out behind her like an acrobat's streamer.

Shego knelt to receive her daughter's leap into her hug with a joyful laugh. "Oof! You're getting too strong little Treasure! You'll have to start being careful or you'll knock your poor old mama over one day!"

"No way!" Amy protested with a wild grin. "You're the strongest mama ever!"

"So! You've had a good first day I'll take it?" Shego had been worried, to tell the truth. She knew only too well how kids reacted to those who were 'different'. Amy's often-insular behaviour, intelligence as well as the strange, dusky colour to her skin and her purple eyes marked the four-year-old out as certainly being that.

"Oh! It was so _cool_ mama!" Amy chirped excitedly. "I did finger-painting and we drew our houses and we read the story of the Hungry Caterpillar again!" Shego had been reading that one to Amy when she was still only two years old! Still, it remained one of the girl's firm favourites, always able to reduce her to helpless giggles. "I petted the bunny rabbit and said hello to the goldfish!"

"I hope it said hello back!" Shego teased, tapping the top of Amy's nose.

"Silly mama! They can only do this!" Amy mimed the gape-mouthed behaviour of a goldfish, making Shego laugh aloud. "I played in the sandbox! And I made my first and best ever friends!"

"Did you really?" Shego said with a genuine smile. "And who would they be?"

"Um…" Amy twisted around in Shego's arms and looked around, her angelic face crumpled into a frown of concentration. "There! Justin! Chess'ka! Over here!"

"Amy!" cried two voices and there was the pitter-patter of two sets of feet approaching fast.

Shego looked up and… _Looked right into the faces of Kim Possible and Ron Stoppable_.

Actually, after a few seconds of paralytic _déjà vu_, Shego realised it _wasn't_ them. Both were blonde, first of all. Although the girl was the Princess's near-double, she had her father's freckles, blue eyes and big ears. The boy was the Sidekick's near-clone though! Smaller ears and slightly rounder face but the match was amazing.

"Justin! Chess'ka! This is my mama!" Amy was saying in an excited babble.

"It's JESSICA!" the girl said in an exasperated tone.

"That's what I said," Amy replied, clearly puzzled.

"Don't worry, I can't always say it," the boy, Justin, said. He stuck out his hand with an ingenuous smile that he _had_ to have learnt from his father. "Pleased to meet you Ms… er… Ms… er… Ms. Amy's mom!"

Amy giggled in reply, not noticing her mother's tension as Justin and Jessica's mother came over. "Justin, Jessie," the woman said firmly, "what have I told you about… about…?"

Shego looked up and decided that the years had been kind to Kim Poss… no, Kim _Stoppable._ She had cut her hair a little shorter but was still beautiful despite having put on some weight around her hips and bust due to bringing the twins into the world. She even still obviously shopped at Club Banana because she was wearing the peasant-style string-tie shirt and designer jeans that Shego remembered from nearly a decade ago. A tiny bit of Shego wanted to laugh at the shock and sudden terror that she saw in her one-time arch-foe's green eyes. "Hey, Princess," she said with a wan smile.

"Justin, Jessica," Kim said, her voice tight. "Come over here to mommy, please."

Shego watched as Kim gripped her son and daughter's shoulders and moved them ever so subtly behind her. Shego could see the pre-fight tension in the younger woman. "Princess, it's okay. I'm not here to hurt your kids, or you."

Kim looked on in suspicion as Shego got to her feet and took Amy's hand in the most non-confrontational way she could, letting the girl stand easily at her side. "So, what _do_ you want, Shego? And who is _she_?" This was added with a jerk of her chin at Amy. Shego could actually _hear_ Kim's thought processes because they were so obvious: _Cloning? No, not a close enough match in appearance. Abduction? But why? Maybe as a hostage or a human shield?_

"She's my mama, of course!" Amy said into the silence.

"She's our best friend, mom!" Jessica declared brightly. "We've been playing with her in the sandbox all afternoon!"

"After we got that rat Brock Flagg to stop being mean to her!" Justin added.

Shego tried to decide whether she wanted to giggle at the way the three children were totally missing the tension of the scene or whether she should find this 'Brock Flagg' kid and barbecue him into charcoal briquettes for being mean to Amy.

"Your little girl?" Kim looked at Shego. There was still some confusion in Kim's face but Shego could tell that, now the initial shock of the meeting was over, she was more relaxed and was no longer treating the situation as a fight about to happen. "How…?"

"What's the matter Princess? Did your mama never tell you about the birds and the bees? I would have thought that now the Sidekick had given you those two…!"

"So not funny, Shego," Kim spat in reply.

Shego winced slightly at the emphasis on her old _nom de crime_. On a sudden insight, she decided that she had to act to reduce the tension before Kim's hair-trigger temper detonated. "Kim, please," she said. Kim was surprised into silence by Shego's use of her given name rather than some taunting nickname. "It's 'Sherylin'. I haven't been 'Shego' now for… God, since long before Amy was conceived."

Kim nodded slowly. "So, what are you doing here?" she asked.

Shego shrugged. "Picking my little Treasure up from school, Kim. Just like you."

Kim grinned. "Somehow… somehow I can't see you as a mother," she said at last. "Who's the father?" The redhead seemed to think of something and grimaced. "Please don't say it was Drakken."

Shego felt physically sick. "Oh God, no," she said. "That would be… _ugh_! The phrase 'wrong-sick' doesn't even come close!" Both women laughed, much to the patent incomprehension of the three children.

"So, what are you doing here in Middleton?"

Shego looked at Kim for a long moment. "What are _you_ doing here, Kim?" she asked at last. "I'm just living my life, day by day, same as everyone else." She looked down at Amy and Kim would never forget the look of utter love that passed between mother and daughter, not realising that she and her children exchanged just such looks all the time.

There was a long pause before Kim spoke again. "Look, She… Sherylin, I'm not gonna say 'let bygones be bygones', but I am going to let things lie because you seem to have changed for the better." Kim paused and scowled dangerously. "If it turns out that you _haven't_ changed…"

Shego laughed and raised her free hand in a gesture of submission. "Message received and understood."

Kim looked down to see how her twins and Amy were pulling outrageous faces at each other and giggling. "Well, it seems as if our kids are determined to be friends," she said at last. "Maybe that's a good starting place."

"Maybe it is at that," Shego allowed.

"Mama?" Shego looked down at Amy. "Mama, what did you mean about 'the birds and the bees'? What have they got to do with anything?" Shego's sudden panic-stricken drought of ideas was clearly mutual given the look of horror on Kim's face. It was only made worse by Jessica's next words.

"Silly! Don't you know _anything_?" the girl said in a tone she had obviously learnt from her mother in her worst 'I am always right' mood. "It's something to do with where babies come from!"

"Yeah?" Amy was sceptical.

"Yeah! I heard daddy tell mommy that Auntie Joss is gonna have a baby because Uncle Wade worked out how to get the birds and bees all fly in the same direction!"

_Sidekick! You are DEAD!_ Shego thought. She _really_ didn't want to have this conversation with Amy when she was just four years old! Hell, she doubted that she would be ready when she was _forty_!

"Cool!" Amy was clearly impressed with Jessica's knowledge and sources. "I wonder how it works…?"

"Oh, I know _that_," Justin announced, posing in what was nearly a parody of a posture of wisdom and authority. "The birds and the bees deliver the babies to their mommies and daddies! The gov'ment decided to use them because it's cheaper than the storks!"

There was a dead pause before everyone started laughing, even Shego and Kim. Kids! You don't want 'em to ever grow up and lose that wonderful innocence!

"You're kinda weird," Amy said to Justin through her giggles and spontaneously slung an arm around his neck in a quick, happy hug. "But I like you!"

Kim stopped laughing when she heard that and her green eyes went _so_ wide, which confused Shego. How could such an innocuous childish comment have provoked such a reaction? It wouldn't be for ten years that Shego would find out.


	4. Fitting In

**Sitches Aplenty**

A Repository of KP Shorts

**Disclaimer**

Kim Possible and the characters and situations of the Kim Possible universe were created by Mark McCorkle and Bob Schooley for the Disney Channel and are the copyright of the Walt Disney Corporation. This is a non-profit fan work for free distribution through the world-wide web. No breach of trademark or copyright is intended.

**Author's Notes**

This is going to be a series of short stories where I take Kim Possible, her friends and her enemies places dictated by my own imagination. These short stories are not part of any larger continuity and will only be linked if I specifically say so in my introductory notes.

Censor: T – Just for safety's sake

A follow-on to 'When Tomorrow Comes'. Shego comes to terms with her daughter's new friends and we meet another member of the next generation.

Hmm… I may turn these into a full-length story eventually.

**4. Fitting In**

"Mommy?" Sherylin Goh, once known (but never again, she had sworn) as Shego, looked up from marking her junior year class's essays to look at her four-year-old daughter Amy. The brown-haired, amethyst-eyed little girl had been drawing something and colouring it in with a surprisingly intense level of concentration.

"Yes, little Treasure?"

"Mommy… am I allowed to have friends?"

Sherylin was so startled by Amy's question that she actually couldn't even get her head clear enough to answer. After a few moments, she realised that Amy's question had to cover some deeper malaise. "Amy, Treasure, why do you ask me that?"

"Well…" Amy paused and looked down at her picture again, clearly wishing to avoid her mother's green eyes, which seemed to let her mother know what she was thinking some days. "I really like Justin and Chess'ka, you know." Sherylin smothered her desire to grin at Amy's continued inability to pronounce the name of her old foe Kim Stoppable's daughter and nodded for Amy to continue. "But I don't think you like me talking to them! Are you mad at me?"

"Of course not, honey!" Shego stood to walk over to her daughter and crouched down so she could look the girl in the eyes. "Honey, you have to understand that mommy…" Sherylin paused, unsure how to explain her life before she settled in Middleton to her still-innocent child. "A long time ago, mommy and Justin and Jessica's mommy didn't like each other very much," she said at last. "It's difficult to see her now, remembering that."

Amy nodded seriously. "Was she mean to you?"

This time Sherylin _had_ to snort out a half-smothered laugh. "Oh, it was mutual, little Treasure, believe me. No, we didn't like each other very much at all. And, yes, we _were_ mean to each other. I guess it's hard to forget stuff like that."

Amy paused to think. "Is she still mean to you?"

Sherylin thought to the invitation, signed by Kim, to the Stoppable family Passover dinner sitting on her bedside cabinet. "No. I think she's trying to be friends with me," she allowed.

"So, you don't mind me being friends with Justin and Chess'ka?"

Sherylin thought _very_ carefully about that. There was no doubt that seeing Amy with Kim's twins was currently the picture next to the word 'ambivalence' in her mental dictionary. It was hard, oh so hard, to overcome the need for anonymity. Even now, years after receiving an unconditional pardon from the UN for her part in defeating the Lowardian invasion, she still lived in fear of the midnight knock at the door from Global Justice… of someone taking away her little girl. Yet, it had been weeks since that meeting outside the Kindergarten. There had been further, slightly awkward meetings but there had been no indication of betrayal or any hint that Kim was going to go back on her promise to 'let things lie'.

There was more than that, though. There no doubt that she was a bit _possessive_ of Amy. Sherylin had so few truly intimate relationships in her life that the special bond she shared with her daughter was particularly precious to her. Seeing her playing with the Stoppable kids… She was _jealous_ of anyone else having a place in her little girl's heart! That couldn't be healthy and, in her heart, she knew that it would only hurt Amy in the long run.

She also thought about how lonely and quiet Amy tended to be. Her little girl was smart and her fear that Amy's healing powers might be accidentally exposed had led her to isolate the girl a lot. That wasn't a good thing, though. Since Amy had started hanging out with Justin and Jessica… it was as if a flower had blossomed. Her daughter had taken to talking a mile a minute and was suddenly so much more interested in… well… 'kid' stuff like group games. Just running around with her two… _friends_… led her to have a joy that Sherylin couldn't recall seeing before.

Sherylin came to a decision. She knew it was a big one and, from now on, it would change everything between her and Amy. There would be no going back from this. It would change her safe, anonymous life here Middleton forever. "No, Amy, I don't mind. It's _okay_ for Justin and Jessica to be your friends. I'm glad that you have friends your own age."

Amy's face seemed to suddenly _erupt_ into the broadest, happiest smile that her mother could remember ever seeing. "Oh, _thank you_ Mommy! That's _great_! I _love _you!" Two little arms were wrapped around Sherylin's neck and a wriggling, joyful little girl was pressed into her in an ecstatic hug.

"I love you too, honey," Sherylin whispered through her tears. She would just have to learn to share her little girl.

Later that evening, after settling her daughter down to sleep, Sherylin walked back through the lounge and saw that Amy's drawing was still sitting on the table. With everything that had happened, both mother and daughter had forgotten to clear it away.

It was a child's stick-figure drawing but it was possible to tell what it was about. There were three short figures and one tall figure. The taller figure had hip-length black hair and the circular face was coloured in a very light green with darker green eyes and a big smile. Sherylin didn't need the label 'MOMMY' to understand who it was supposed to be. Next to the tall figure was a little figure (basically a triangle for a skirt, a square for the upper body and a circle for a face) with brown hair and purple eyes ('ME'). Then there was a creditable attempt at a little boy with blond hair and blue eyes ('JUSTIN'). Finally, there was a second little girl. That one had blonde hair and blue eyes ('JESSICA'). Well, Amy could _spell_ it, even if she couldn't _pronounce_ it.

Looking at the bottom of the sheet, Sherylin realised that this was a homework assignment of some sort. In more adult writing, Amy's teacher, Ms. Chevus, had written: "_Draw yourself with the people you love._"

Sherylin smiled slightly, knowing that she had made the right decision.

* * *

Sherylin and Kim Stoppable stood, unconsciously just outside punch or kick range, and watched each other nervously as letting-out time for the Pre-K kids drew ever closer. "So…" Kim said at last. "I… uh… never got a reply to the invitation."

"Something came up," Sherylin said. "I'm sorry that I missed it. I'm not… uh… really religious anyway."

Kim shrugged. "Hey, genuine lapsed Presbyterian girl here. Ron's Jewish, though, and we decided to bring up the 'Kins with knowledge of both faiths so they could choose for themselves when they grew up."

Sherylin's eyebrows shot up. "Kins?"

Kim coloured prettily. "Uh… short for 'Munchkins'." She explained.

Sherylin laughed, but not mockingly. "Hey, I call Amy 'Treasure', so I've got no basis to judge or condemn! I think it's cute anyway!" Kim laughed nervously.

Then the doors swung open. Ms. Chevus, barely in charge, managed to get out of the way before a tidal wave of nearly twenty 4- and 5-year-olds poured out.

"Mom!" Justin and Jessica – spookily in unison; A twin-thing probably.

"Mommy!" That was Amy.

Almost in unison, Kim and Sherylin were kneeling to receive their children in tight embraces. The two women's green eyes met and, in that moment, realised that, no matter what had passed before, they now had too much in common to remain wary of each other.

"So, how was your day?" Kim asked her twins.

"It was great, Mom!" Justin.

"Miss Chevus…" Jessica.

"Told us that…" Justin again.

"We had to…" Back to Jessica.

"Draw a picture of our house and tell…" Justin, starting to run out of breath.

"Everyone about it in class tomorrow!" Jessica, triumphant at reaching the end of the story.

Kim's eyes snapped from Justin to Jessica and back but she didn't seem to be having any trouble understanding. Sherylin decided that Kim probably had more than enough experience to handle their 'twin-speak'.

Amy seemed a bit glum. "What is it, honey?" Sherylin asked.

"I'm not sure what to say," the girl admitted after a moment.

"Hey! That's not a problem!" Justin said excitedly.

"Yeah!" Jessica added, as always on her twin brother's wavelength. "Why don't we help you?"

Kim smiled. "That's a great idea, Jessica," she said. She looked over at Amy. "How about it, Amy? More brains make lighter work an' all that!"

Amy frowned, then looked up at her mother, a silent plea in her eyes. Sherylin sucked in a deep breath. "Kim, I have lots of work to do tonight, I can't really spare the time to run Amy over and…" Sherylin's heart threatened to break at the look of disappointment on Amy's face.

"Hey, so not the drama!" Kim interrupted. "Amy can eat over at our place. Ron'll be back from the restaurant at six-thirty and can drive Amy back to your place." _Wherever that is,_ Kim added silently.

Sherylin suddenly came up against one of those pesky life-changing moments. Did she _really_ trust Kim? More importantly, would she trust her with _Amy_? Sherylin looked at Amy's hopeful expression. The little girl didn't need to speak for Sherylin to hear the plea: '_Can I, Mommy? Pleeeaaase?_' _At least she isn't trying that damn pout she learnt from someone sometime recently_, Sherylin thought unhappily.

The woman tried to think logically. Kim was a dyed-in-the-wool _good guy_. She would never hurt Amy or use her against her mother in some demented scheme in the way that she… she… _The way Shego_ _would_.

Sherylin sighed. That was what she was afraid of: _Shego_ would not have hesitated to use having a foe's child in her power as a psychological weapon. _Kim isn't like that_, she reminded herself. It was, perhaps, a dispiriting indication of just how totally her nearly two decades of living as a super-villain had affected her. She hadn't been a trustworthy person and, in turn, she had difficulty trusting others. _Just because I'm screwed up in the head, doesn't mean that Amy has to suffer_, she decided.

Sherylin turned her eyes back to her little girl. "If I let you go around Justin and Ch…" Sherylin had to stop to correct herself. "Justin and Jessica's house, will you be good?" Amy nodded, her royal purple eyes wide with innocence. "_Really_ good, I mean?" Another frantic nod. "Because if you aren't, believe me, kiddo, I _will_ find out and the consequences…!"

Amy stepped back with an expression of injured dignity. "Mommy, I _promise_," she said, making a 'cross my heart' gesture. Sherylin twisted to look behind her daughter to make sure she wasn't crossing her fingers behind her back. "Okay, as you've promised, I guess I've got to let it happen."

"Coolio!" That was Justin, of course. The boy virtually materialised at Amy's side to take her hand. Amy looked at her mother and mouthed 'I love you. Mommy' with a smile before joining Jessica and Justin at Kim's side.

"One thing, Kim," Sherylin asked. "Who exactly is cooking tonight?"

Kim blushed. "I'll have you know that I've _learnt_ to cook," Kim snapped. "The days of the girl who turned kitchens into HAZMAT zones is long gone!"

"Yeah, so long as we double-check the microwave cooking times," Justin said guilelessly. Jessica scowled and punched him on the shoulder. "What? Daddy says…" Sherylin couldn't help laughing.

"An exaggeration," Kim said, mortified.

"Don't worry, Kim, I had to learn from scratch too," the former arch-villainess said. "Motherhood thing."

Sherylin Goh watched, her emotions an undefinable whirl, as Kim drove away with her daughter in a silver mini-van (Registration KST0P2). In her _head_ Sherylin knew that Amy would be back tonight. However, the day had taught her that the wounds in her heart and soul would take a lot longer to heal.

* * *

"Okay! Welcome to _Casa de Stoppable_!" Justin said, practically dragging Amy into the entrance foyer of the Stoppables' three-storey house. He saw the violet-eyed girl's confusion. "Well, that's what my daddy calls it," he remarked.

Jessica sighed and extracted her best friend from her hyper brother's grasp. "Come on, Amy, I'll show you my room!" she offered.

Kim watched with interest as several emotions including _jealousy_ of all things flash across her son's face. "Why don't you go with them, Justin?" she suggested. "Then you can show her _your_ room afterwards."

"Cool idea, Mom!" Justin said. He set off at a run before suddenly coming screeching to a halt. He paused to consider for a moment. "Um… I might want to tidy it up first."

Kim grinned. "Good idea, dear," she said sardonically. _Well, if nothing else, at least having a new friend around has sparked whatever of my 'organised and tidy' genes Justin inherited._ The redheaded woman turned to prepare to make dinner. The truth was, as always, somewhere between Justin's innocent repetition of his father's tease and Kim's wishes. She _could_ cook, but nothing elaborate, certainly nothing on the scale of Ron's gastronomic genius. That had been a frustration for many years. Combined with her lack of most traditional home-making skills, it made her wonder if she was _capable_ of being Ron's wife and mother to his children. It was Jean Stoppable who reminded her that Ron loved _Kim_, not a potential housecleaner/caterer.

Kim set up the potatoes in the oven and began working on the stew (easy because everything went in one pot), she heard the kids laughing about something upstairs. She was pleased to see Justin and Jessica reaching out. However, she couldn't forget Amy's comments that first day they met. It was a coincidence, of course, but Kim couldn't help but wonder what the future of this friendship would be.

The doorbell rang. Kim wiped off her hands and, determining that nothing in the kitchen needed her immediate attention, walked over to the door to find out who was visiting. A quick look at a LCD monitor mounted in the wall showed a familiar enough face. She opened the door. "Hey, K," her visitor said with a tired smile.

"B!" Kim greeted her colleague and partner with a grin. "I wasn't expecting you around tonight!" She looked down at Bonnie Rockwaller's… well 'mini-me'. Veronica 'Ronni' Rockwaller was her mother in miniature apart from bright blue eyes rather than her mother's light blue-grey. "Hey, Ronni!"

"Hi, Auntie Kim!" the girl beamed. Something that was rarely seen on Bonnie's face.

Bonnie looked a bit uncertain and her expression had an edge of sadness. "K, I'm sorry to do this to you, but something has come up. I know this is an imposition, but could you look after Ronni for me tonight?"

Kim sighed. "Well, I've got company over tonight, but I guess one more won't be a problem. Nothing's wrong I hope?"

Bonnie sighed. "Nothing that you can help me with," she said at last.

"Auntie Connie got arrested again," Ronni said seriously. Bonnie squeezed her daughter's shoulder. "Sorry, Mom."

Kim sighed. "Okay, Bonnie. I can look after her tonight. Justin and Jessica have got a friend from Pre-K over, but I don't think that they'll begrudge space to my favourite god-daughter." Ronni grinned up at her Auntie Kim.

"Okay, Squirt. Best behaviour," Bonnie instructed. "Off upstairs with you." As if she had been released from some invisible leash, Ronnie shot up stairs, heading right towards the bedroom of her sister-in-all-but-blood, Jessica Stoppable. Bonnie looked down before looking back at Kim with a shaky smile. "Thanks for this, K. I couldn't handle her _and_ my 'older' sister tonight. Let alone _Mom_!"

Kim sighed and held out her arms for a hug. "This isn't good, Bonnie. Four times in the last year? She's never repaid the money you shelled out to pay her bail and her fines either!"

Bonnie sucked in a sob before launching into her partner's arms. "I don't know what I can do for her, Kim. The stupid _bitch_ was in a DUI smash. Her car had so much dope lying around in it…!"

Kim tightened her hug. "She's been nothing but a source of pain for you, Bonnie. Lonnie too. You've got to cut these ties eventually or they'll drag you down when they crash and burn."

"I think she already has, crashed and burned Kim…" Bonnie said. "The cops say that someone _died_…!"

"Oh… Bonnie!"

* * *

Upstairs, without a knock or even a word, Ronni had barged into Jessica's room. She glared at the intruder within before stomping towards her. "Who are you?" she demanded.

"I'm Amy! Who are you?" Amy was a bit startled by this aggressive approach but her Mommy had never backed down when people were rude at the store or anything, so _she_ wasn't about to be scared by a girl who was actually a little shorter than her!

"I'm Ronni! Why are you in my best friend's room?"

"Hey! _I'm_ her best friend!"

Jessica coloured. "Uh… Ronni?" Ronni looked over at her god-sister. "Ronni, this is Amy. We met her at Pre-K."

Ronni nodded, her expression closed and suspicious. "Pleased to meet you," Amy tried, sticking out a hand.

In an unconscious imitation of her mother, Ronni snorted, crossed her arms and, pointedly ignoring the hand, she strode over to her best friend, her nose in the air. "Jessica, Mommy says I've got to stay with you tonight," she explained.

"Hey! There's no need to be rude!" Justin snapped before his sister could say anything. The other three turned around to see him standing framed by the doorway. "Amy said she was pleased to meet you! Be nice to her back!"

There was a long pause as Ronni stared at Justin, clearly trying to make the boy shrivel away with the power of her glare. It never worked. The boy just looked at her with what his father referred to as 'the serious face'. Finally, with a snort of displeasure, she stomped back over to Amy. She gave the dusky-skinned girl a perfunctory shake of the hand and a super-insincere smile. "Hello," she purred, glaring at the 'intruder'.

Amy glared right back at Ronni. "I can't see how you could be Chess'ka's friend," she responded. "She's nice and you're mean!"

Several contradictory thoughts collided in the four-year-old brunette's head. "Hey!" she protested. "I'm nice!"

"Well, you aren't acting like it!"

"That isn't _fair_!" Ronni had started to go a little red and there were the first hints of an incipient Rockwaller tantrum. Justin had stepped forwards to intervene when there was a loud 'HEM-HEM'! Both girls whirled to look at Jessica, who was standing, arms folded, in an unconscious imitation of her mother when her uncles Jim and Tim got _too_ silly.

"Amy's gonna have dinner over here and then we're gonna help her with her homework," Jessica explained to her god-sister. "Amy, I've known Ronni here since, like, forever. Her mommy and my mommy work together, y'see." Amy nodded wisely. "Ronni, Amy's cool, she really is! Give her a chance!"

There was an uncomfortable pause before Ronni nodded, biting her lip. Amy's 'Ouch' sense (as she thought of it) couldn't pick up any injuries to the brunette girl, so she couldn't understand why she looked like she was in pain. On an instinct, she reached out and touched the girl's arm. "Maybe you can sit with us and help too," Amy said at last. "I'd like that."

"You… would?" Ronni blinked. Suddenly the girl smiled, a genuine smile this time. She was afraid that this other girl was going to take her sister away! Maybe that _wasn't _going to happen!

The three girls sat down on a rug at the side of Jessica's bed. Much to Ronni's surprise, Justin sat down too. "What do _you_ want?" she snapped at the boy.

"I'm helping Amy too!"

"You?" The disbelief in Ronni's expression was literally comical.

"Hey! I want him to help!" Amy leapt to her friend's defence.

Ronnie looked at the new girl in some puzzlement. "Why would you want _his_ help?" she couldn't help but blurt out. "He's… _weird_!"

"So? I happen to _like_ him!" Amy posed in a dignified way (Well, it would have been dignified if she was fully grown – on a 4-year-old, it was nearly a parody).

Ronnie's blue eyes sparkled with humour. She looked at Jessica before starting. "Amy and Justin! Sitting in a tree!"

"K-I-S-S-I-N-G!" Ronnie and Jessica finished together.

"_Kissing? Yuck! That's __gross__!_" Amy and Justin blurted out simultaneously.

All four kids looked at each other in surprise before bursting into laughter.

"So," Ronnie said after sobering up. "Amy. What did you call Jessica again?"

"Call her?" Amy frowned, puzzled. "I didn't call her anything!"

"Yes, you did!" Ronni insisted. "You said something else!"

Amy shook her head. "I didn't!" She insisted. "You tell her Chess'ka!"

Ronnie pounced. "There! You said it again!"

"Said what? I said her name!"

"Her name's 'Jessica'!" Ronni said. "What's wrong with you? Can't you say it?"

"I can!" Amy insisted. "Chess'ka!"

"Jessica!"

"Chess'ka!"

"JESS-EE-KAH!"

"CHESS-KAH!"

Ronni stopped and looked at the new girl thoughtfully. Suddenly she looked over at Jessica and smiled in an oh-so-dangerous way. "You know… it doesn't sound so bad really." Jessica looked at her god-sister in disbelief. "Actually, I think it's kinda cool: Chess'ka." Ronni acted as if she was tasting the word.

"Yeah, I kinda like it," Justin agreed. He and Ronni looked at each other and grinned.

"Don't say that!" Jessica protested. "You'll make her do it again!"

Justin and Ronni just grinned at Jessica and pointed at her. "Chess'ka! Chess'ka!" they chorused.

"That's right! That's her name! Chess'ka Stop'ble." Amy said, looking confused.

Jessica's face went through about a dozen emotions in just a few seconds. "You… TEASE!" she shrieked and suddenly launched herself at her god-sister, bowling the other girl over and pinning her to the floor before starting to tickle her.

"AAAHHH! HELP! JUSTIN! AMY! HELP!" Amy and Justin piled in too, trying to pry Jessica off of Ronni and, when that failed, tickling her too. Pretty soon someone (and no one ever worked out who) threw a pillow. From there on in, it was a free-for-all of pillows, tickles and tackles, all accompanied by shrieks of exaggerated fear and rage and endless laughter.

The door flew open after just a few minutes. "What on Earth is going on up here?" Kim gasped at the tangle of shrieking, giggling kindergarteners in front of her. "I thought that a war had started up here or something!"

The four kids blushed and tried to arrange themselves in a more appropriate way. "We was just playing, Mommy!" Justin insisted.

"They keep on saying my name wrong!" Jessica shouted, her face bright red, on the verge of a genuine, patented Possible eruption.

"No we don't!" Amy insisted, drawing a look of mixed annoyance from Jessica. "We're just saying her name: Chess'ka!"

Kim frowned and quickly worked out what was up. "Right. Here's what we're gonna do. Justin and Ronni are going to stop teasing Jessica. Jessie, you aren't going to get all amped up about Amy pronouncing your name in her own way, especially as she isn't being rude or mean. Got that?"

"Yes, Mom," the twins chorused.

"Yes, Auntie Kim," Ronnie sighed.

"Yes, Mrs. Stoppable," Amy said, looking down somehow guessing that she was the cause of all this trouble.

Kim smiled kindly at the dusky-skinned girl. "Mrs. Stoppable is Justin and Jessie's grandma, Amy. Call me 'Auntie Kim'." That suggestion made the girl look up with a renewed smile. The red-headed woman looked around. "Dinner will be ready in ten minutes. So, I want this… _disaster zone _cleared up. After dinner, you can tell us how far you've got with your assignment." She looked at the expressions of mutual horror on the four children's faces and sighed. "You were having so much fun rough-housing up here that you forgot all about it, didn't you?"

The four children sat with their notebooks and pencils, trying to work out what Amy should say about her house tomorrow. "Chess'ka," Ronni said with a little giggle, breaking the silence. Jessica went red in the face.

"Ronni! Mommy said…!"

"No, I like it!" Ronni insisted. "I do! I think it's cool!"

Jessica blinked at her god-sister in surprise. "You do?"

"You got to admit that it sounds… diff'rent!" Justin added.

Jessica nodded thoughtfully. "Chess'ka," she said at last. "Yeah, it does sound cool, doesn't it?" And so it was, from that night, to her friends, and, increasingly through the years, to her family that was her name. On all except legal documents and at formal events, she was Chess'ka.

* * *

Kim walked down stairs with a slight smile on her face. "Everything okay up there, KP?" Ron asked her from where he was helping to set the table.

Kim shook her head. "They were just being kids," she replied. "I've got everything sorted, Ron. I just…" she woman frowned.

"KP?"

Kim shrugged. "I think something has started. I'm not sure _what_, but I know that it has just started."


	5. Flight of the Blue Fox

**Sitches Aplenty**

A Repository of KP Shorts

**Disclaimer**

Kim Possible and the characters and situations of the Kim Possible universe were created by Mark McCorkle and Bob Schooley for the Disney Channel and are the copyright of the Walt Disney Corporation.

Stargate SG-1 was developed by Brad Wright and Jonathan Glassner.

This is a non-profit fan work for free distribution through the world-wide web. No breach of trademark or copyright is intended.

**Author's Notes**

This is going to be a series of short stories where I take Kim Possible, her friends and her enemies places dictated by my own imagination. These short stories are not part of any larger continuity and will only be linked if I specifically say so in my introductory notes.

Censor: T – Just for safety's sake

This is the first KP story that I ever wrote, _waaay_ back in the mists of time. It was originally going to be the prologue of a longer story covering Kim's senior year at high school and her college years. I actually came up with the idea of Kim competing in the Olympics long before I read the Captain's story but I gladly defer to his fine work on that subject.

This is a stand-alone but, having read through it again, it could be considered to be part of the same universe as 'When Tomorrow Comes' and 'Fitting In'. It is, as you will shortly see, a 'straight' crossover with Stargate SG-1.

**5. Flight of the Blue Fox**

The Nevada Desert; A flat, almost featureless plain that runs up to the Rocky Mountains, behind which are the fertile coastal plains of California. Not much happens here, unless you happen to be a dust-scratching cowboy or desert-dwelling animal of some kind.

An example of the latter group was a small lizard, crawling over a stretch of asphalt. For a cold-blooded creature, the high heat reflective nature of the artificial surface was a perfect place to soak up the life-giving heat of the sun. However, this wasn't the place for anything to rest, if it had more than a shard of self-preservation instinct. A pair of heavy wheels on a long metal leg rolled up, along with two larger wheels in pairs spread out to either side. Accompanying this sudden intruder was a high-pitched whine like that of turbines. The lizard made itself scarce.

A strange matt-black aircraft stopped at the end of a long runway. The aircraft didn't really look like anything else in the world. It had a wide, broad wing that curved forwards and downwards like a gull's wings. It had at thick, stubby fuselage, which went only a little way to the front and the rear of the wing. A pair of 'butterfly' rudders stuck out at diagonal angles either side of a pair of powerful engines that glowed with an unearthly fire. The cockpit canopy was heavily framed and had tinted glass. The only markings on the aircraft were a symbol on the wings like a capital 'A' without the crossbar but a small circle at the top and a cartoon fox in lurid neon blue painted either side of the nose. The combined package looked fast, high-tech and out-of-this-world.

"_Blue Fox, this is Tower. You are cleared for take off at your discretion._"

"Roger that, Tower. Blue Fox is lighting the fires." The woman in the cockpit of the sleek aircraft leant back in her reclining ejector seat and sucked in a deep breath before taking the throttle control in her left hand and the control stick in her right. With the clear knowledge that she was in a nearly-untested product of a precocious genius and a highly-unpredictable talent for throwing together 'gizmos' from what were close to scrap parts, she slowly slid the throttles forwards.

Far behind her, the two powerful engines in between the diagonal 'butterfly' rudders began to glow a bright orange-yellow with power. Slowly at first, but with ever increasing speed, the black aircraft with the graceful forward and downward-cured crescent-shaped wing. "V-One," the pilot announced as the speed indicator on her HUD display passed 250 miles per hour. She pulled back on the stick in front of her right armrest and, almost immediately, the aircraft's noise jerked up to the sky. "V-Two!"

With a roar, the experimental aircraft punched up into the sky. The pilot manipulated controls, retracting the landing gear and the aerodynamic flaps. The woman grinned behind the anonymity of her face mask. She had to hand it to the team. The XF-308 Sabre was, just as they had promised, like nothing else in the skies. Its engines provided acceleration beyond what seemed possible. The responses of its control systems were so fast that the aircraft seemed to be responding to her thoughts.

The pilot took a moment to look out of her cockpit. In only a few minutes, she had ascended to over five miles into the sky (20,000 feet). She was cruising at over 600mph and, she could feel through her gloves, the aircraft still had a lot to offer. "Control, this is Blue Fox," the pilot announced to the bevy of scientists, engineers and military folk watching the flight from the underground C-in-C room. "I am at holding altitude. What's the word guys?"

There was a long pause before the pilot heard her husband's voice over the radio. "_KP, you are green and go. Cleared for phase two!_"

The pilot briefly smiled at her husband's affectionate nickname for her, maintained even long after her initials had changed. She sucked in another deep breath before tugging back on the stick. The Sabre's nose tilted up again to a staggering 85 degrees up-angle. Then, with a thrill of anticipation in her heart, she pushed the throttles all the way forward. There was an explosion from somewhere behind of her and, even with the newfangled inertial dampers in action, the pilot felt a foot pushing her back into her seat. Were they malfunctioning? The pilot took looked down at her instrument panel and noted that the accelerometer was reading _26g_, or about nine times the peak acceleration of the Space Shuttle! If it weren't for the dampers, she would be an oily stain on the rear bulkhead!

The Sabre continued its impossible zoom climb without any slacking of acceleration or any indication that it would ever end. Around the pilot, the colour of the sky deepened, past navy blue and indigo until it faded to a deep, black velvet studded with innumerable diamonds. A peek out of the side showed the Earth curving away from her, the brown-yellow Nevada desert now coated with a thin layer of blue atmosphere; Were those small white towers so far, far below her _clouds_? In the distance to the right, she could see the Caribbean Sea. Altitude was already passing 100 miles! She had only been climbing for ninety seconds! This was _impossible_!

Then again, the pilot realised, she should know perfectly well that _nothing_ is impossible. Hell, she had repeated that claim enough times as a teenager. It just rhymed so well with her name, Kim Possible. Bravado aside, though,, the engines in this machine defied everything that she knew of engineering (while she couldn't claim to know as much as some, she knew enough). There were stupid rumours about Groom Lake Air Force Base, Kim knew. Wade told her of the theories on the Internet about alien technology and machines that were hybrids of human and extraterrestrial technology. Maybe that would explain why, when she asked her husband about the origins of the Sabre, he had responded: "KP, you don't want to know."

Kim shook her head as the Sabre continued its climb towards Low Earth Orbit. Who needed re-engineered alien technology when you had Wade Load as chief scientist? And when you added the off-beat maverick engineering talent who built an anti-personnel hovercraft out of the junk ol' Doc Drakken had in his loft…? Well, her husband had come a long way from that sometimes-geeky, but always-true blond boy with the naked mole rat and the nacho fixation that she had known as a teenager. Ron Stoppable was now the guy with the (top secret) reputation as being the engineer who could make _anything_ work, no matter _how_ crazy it sounded. Yeah, the three of them were still _Team Possible_! _Nothing _was impossible for them!

With a rebel yell that must have puzzled the listeners back at Area 51, Kim Stoppable rolled her aircraft onto its back and hauled back on the control stick to insert the world's first true aerospace fighter into its' first orbit.

* * *

"Are you sure that she can handle that machine, Stoppable?"

Ron rolled his eyes. One of the problems of working for the government, even on a consultantcy basis, was that you had to pretend to be civil to a lot of _serious_ creeps. Almost all of them seemed to wear military uniforms. "Sir, I promise you that Kim has dealt with situations that makes this seem like an evening of cheerleading practice in high school."

The general snorted. "Your loyalty to your wife is commendable, Dr. Stoppable," he replied. "However, I find myself wondering how a _lawyer_ came to be the chief test pilot in this project." The general failed in the attempt to keep a sneer out of his voice. "Frankly, I am surprised that she even knew how to get that machine off the ground."

Ron tensed slightly. KP (as he continued to think of Kim, even though her initials had changed) didn't need anyone's help or protection. However, Ron took that bit about 'love and cherish' very seriously. He was saved from the consequence of shouting at the head of USAF Space Command by a quiet cough at waist level on the general's other side.

The general looked down at Wade Load, who was smiling patronisingly up at him from his chair surrounded by a forest of LCD computer and video displays. "Have you ever read Ms. Stoppable's personnel file, General?" he asked.

"Of course I have," the general snorted. "So she is the daughter of a rocket scientist and a neuro-surgeon as well as being an Olympic gymnast, honours student and a private practice attorney. What has that got to do with anything?"

The smile on Wade's broad, chocolate-brown face was unchanged. "No, general, you are familiar with the _declassified_ portion of her file. You might be interested in reading its classified parts… those of which you are cleared to see, that is."

The general bristled as he snatched the file from a young lab assistant who had materialised at Wade's side. Ron grinned and winked at his agoraphobic friend as the general's face went an interesting shade of red… and then purple. "There must be some mistake!" the man blurted.

"No mistake, general," Ron said with an infernal grin. "My Kimmie is da _man_! Metaphorically speakin' of course!"

"But… A qualified pilot at the age of _thirteen_? Rated an expert at essentially every martial art? Passed SOCOM training on just her first week at the age of just _sixteen_? Qualified as a Navy SEAL the next month?!? Cleared for all kinds of parachute and free-fall descent at fourteen? Cleared for ultra-depth suit diving at just fifteen? Qualified as a pilot on the DreamChaser space plane and the Altair lunar excursion vehicle when she was only seventeen?" The blustering staff officer shook his head. "This… this is impossible!"

Wade and Ron grinned and winked at each other. "General, I assure you that the word 'impossible' simply does not apply to this woman," Wade replied, making Ron choke down on a laugh. The general's eye tracked down to this prodigy's maiden name. "Kim Possible?" he blurted. "_She_ is…?"

"That's right!" Ron said with a smirk.

"Most people think of her as an urban legend," Wade added easily, "but she is as real as it gets."

The general's state of utter amazement wasn't in any way improved as a naked mole rat crawled out of a pocket of Ron's lab coat and crawled up onto his master's shoulder. Rufus shot the general a 'V-for Victory' gesture and chattered something that sounded like: "Hnuk! Kimmie is coolest!"

* * *

About 200 miles above an apoplectic general, Kim had just finished her checklist and was beginning to enjoy the space flight in her new mount. Although she could not change orbital paths without using the main engines again, she found that the combination of the plasma sustainer drives and ion pulse manoeuvring jets gave the Sabre in-orbit agility that surpassed any conventional spacecraft. Kim had been amusing herself with a series of soaring loops and break turns to familiarise herself with the twin control sticks that were used for space manoeuvring. She hoped this was giving Ron and Wade's merry band of white-coated geeks an interesting day.

_Beep-beep-de-beep!_

Kim grinned when she heard the familiar attention tones coming from her earphones and switched the UHF transceiver control over to 'transmit/receive'. "What's the sitch, Wade?" she couldn't resist replying.

"_I hope you've been enjoying yourself, Kim_," Wade replied, his face appearing on the right-hand Multi-Function Display (MFD) on Kim's control panel.

"It could be improved," Kim shot back. "Where is the cup holder? Where is the multi-disk CD player? Duh, Wade! No makeup mirror on the passenger-side sun shade!"

Wade laughed. "_I'll have to add those on the next upgrade_," he replied.

"Just don't let Ron put furry dice over the windshield," Kim begged with a straight face.

"_Hey! I heard that!_" called Ron's voice from off-camera. The blond man stuck his face into the shot and glared at his wife. "_I don't do 'geek' stuff like that anymore, Kim…! Not much anyway…!_"

"I know a certain man who thinks that go-faster stripes are cool!" Kim mocked in a sing-song voice.

Wade managed to regain control of the situation before another endless round of Kim-and-Ron flirting could begin. If it had been bad when they were both first starting out as a couple, it was ten times worse now. "_Kim, this is important!_" he snapped.

"I'm sorry, Wade," Kim said with a genuine tone of apology.

"_Yeah, likewise_," Ron said. Before he leaned back out of shot, however, he shot Kim a 'You're gonna get it' look that made Kim smile. She enjoyed it when Ron got annoyed and _playful_.

"_It's time for phase 3_," Wade explained. "_Check your radar. According to my calculations…_" and here the former boy genius tapped away at his ever-present laptop that he still preferred, despite being allowed to play with the most powerful supercomputers that the US Government could buy. "_You should be on the same orbital path as the target drones and less than a minute away from missile range_."

Kim pressed a button beside her left-hand MFD and threw a switch to turn on the Sabre's APG-71X phased-array pulse-doppler radar. Immediately, the screen lit up with a host of contacts, literally hundreds of objects larger than 1cm-diameter sharing the same orbit as her air/spacecraft. "Got a lot of interference," she told Wade.

"_Go to discriminator mode_," Wade advised. "_That should clear away the clutter_."

Kim nodded silently and touched another control beside the MFD. Immediately, most of the contacts disappeared. Now only those larger than 10cm-diameter or on a collision course were visible on the screen. The computer also assigned colours to various objects. Space junk showed up white, other spacecraft a series of colours denoting their volume. Kim was interested in the two red dots sliding down her screen. "Wade, I've got the drones on scope." Kim immediately touched the control on her throttle stick that would cause the braking jets on the nose of the Sabre to fire, matching orbital velocity with the target drones.

Wade nodded and looked around at the various displays surrounding his seat. _"The diagnostics check out, Kim. You are go for the live-fire test_."

This bit made Kim feel uncomfortable. Whatever she had done as a youth, it was always for the good of all of mankind. She didn't like the thought that, even indirectly, she would be assisting the development of technologies that would let one nation gain dominance over others. Only the presence of military and civilian personnel from Britain, France, Russia, Japan and China at Area 51 had assured her that, whatever it was the Sabre was intended to do, it would not include changing the balance of power.

Another clue to that possibility was the small control panel just under the autopilot panel and the HUD reflector. A Post-It note was stuck on the panel, covering most of the controls with the strict instruction: 'No!' in Ron's untidy handwriting. What interested Kim was that one of the visible switches was clearly marked 'Hyperdrive Motivator'. Curiouser and curiouser.

Kim reached forward, flipped up a red cover and threw a switch marked 'Master Arm'. There was a hum and the centre MFD suddenly lit up with an outline of the Sabre, highlighting its various weapons options: XIM-120 Scorpion, XIM-132 Stiletto, XGM-54 Maverick and XSM-84 Harpoon. Familiar names, but decidedly unfamiliar forms. Kim forced herself to relax and recall her simulator lessons. She switched the weapons to air-to-air mode and selected the nearest target drone. The HUD immediately painted a green box around the still-distant satellite. "I'm not getting much of a heat reading from the drones," she remarked. "No point even trying this with a Stiletto. Switching to radar mode." Immediately a tone sounded in Kim's headset and a diamond appeared around the marked satellite. "That's done the trick. Scorpion One locked on."

"_Give 'em hell, KP_," Ron replied. "_Uh… if you can do that to a couple o' flying trash cans…_"

Kim choked down an urge to laugh. _Damn_, if only Doc Drakken could see her now! Laser beams and vaporising machines, most of which never actually worked…! _Ha_! This was the _real thing_! "Blue Fox," she signalled, "_Fox One_!" Kim stabbed at the firing trigger. There was a 'clank' from somewhere behind and to the left. With a quickly-fading 'hiss' of hot gas, a long wingless dart of a missile shot away from the Sabre, propelled by a globe of yellow-gold flame. For seventy long seconds, Kim watched the radar-guided missile as it sped towards the target satellite. There was a blue-white flash and the target satellite simply splashed apart into shards of silvery metal.

"_Boo-yah! Nice shot, KP!_" Ron exulted. There was a small camera on the side of Kim's helmet. Through that, Ron and Wade could see everything that she could see.

"_Um…_" The hairs on the back of Kim's neck rose up at the amazing amount of worry that Wade had put into that one syllable. "_Kim, could you look at your radar?_"

Kim did so and saw that a large number of significantly large bits of wreckage were heading straight for her. "Wade…" she said in a warning tone.

"_I was afraid of this. No air to slow the debris down, so it keeps going until it hits something,_" the genius told her.

Kim growled a little. "That's nice. What am I going to do about it?"

"_This might be a good time to test the electro-plasma cannon,_" Wade suggested.

_Oh, yeah_, Kim thought, feeling a bit abashed at freezing up, if only for a few moments. The former girl crime-fighter pushed the weapon selection switch on her control stick to 'guns' and watched as the HUD suddenly changed to displaying a lead computing gun-sight. Each piece of debris large enough and fast enough to endanger her armoured fighter was now highlighted with a little green circle. "Let's do this!" she snapped.

Kim squeezed the trigger and pairs of blue-white fireballs, artificial ball-lightning, spat from tubes in the wing roots and under the nose. The second volley touched the nearest bit of debris, which flashed white hot and vaporised. Kim immediately touched her control stick to bring another bit of debris into view. Kim was a deadly accurate aerial gunner. But she was fighting a losing battle and she knew it. There was too much debris and not enough time to target it all.

"_Go evasive, Kim,_" Wade said, demonstrating his usual uncanny ability to read her situation, even from a distance.

"Evasive? In a spacecraft?" Kim replied.

"_KP, this isn't just any spacecraft! Do it!_" Kim had only heard that tone of command from Ron a few times in her life, but she knew that he never kidded her about these things. With a touch at the controls, she triggered the space fighter's boosters.

The Sabre surged forwards. Kim took the controls and let her instincts take charge, threading the agile spacecraft through the sleet of sharp metal pieces that the destruction of the first target satellite had liberated into the heavens. Now, Kim was 'in the zone'. Keeping the boosters firing, she charged at the second target drone and let her gun-sights track over the cylindrical mass. She squeezed the trigger again and put five full volleys of plasma fire fully onto the target.

At that point, Kim suddenly realised that she had created another obstacle course to traverse. _Well, hell,_ she thought. _If Shego's plasma gloves didn't stop me, what will a little scrap metal do?_ Kim rammed the throttles up to maximum and used every bit of power that the ion manoeuvring jets could give her to perform an Innalmann Turn and head back towards the planet, racing the deadly darts of debris as she did so.

* * *

The general looked across the flat desert of the great Groom Lake dry lake bed with a disgusted expression. He still hadn't forgiven Ron and Wade for finding such a famous figure to act as the project chief test pilot and was looking hard for a screw-up to criticise. "Well?" he spat.

"She should be here any minute, General," Ron replied, looking a lot less confident than he sounded. "Her re-entry path should take her right overhead."

"If it doesn't slam her into the desert in a million pieces," the general replied spitefully. "That was a damn fool stunt she pulled on that second target drone."

Ron bristled angrily. "Look, pal, if you find something wrong with our procedures or work then criticise away! But don't get all full of bad attitude just because a _woman _is flying this super-machine that you wanted so badly!"

Lieutenant General George Hammond of USAF Space Command's Homeworld Security Directorate was about to blow his stack and take the maverick young engineer down a few pegs before he suddenly caught himself. "Of course, I'm sorry," he replied, surprising Ron. "There is a lot riding on this prototype, Mr. Stoppable. More than you can possibly imagine."

Wade's voice suddenly crackled through the radio headset that Ron was wearing. "_Here she comes, Ron!_" he called.

Ron looked around the sky and saw no condensation trail, no sign of activity. "Where?" he asked stupidly.

On his shoulder, Rufus looked behind himself and his little black eyes opened very wide. "Uh oh!" he squeaked and dived into Ron's breast pocket. A few moments later, with a roar of plasma drives, the Sabre shot right over Ron and General Hammond's heads at an altitude of a little under thirty feet. The sleek otherworldly-styled aerospace fighter climbed away slightly, its landing gear opening up as it did so, as well as a big air brake built into the fuselage behind the cockpit. The aircraft ascended to about 100 feet and then seemed to stop mid-air before performing a half-turn and heading right back the way it had come, right towards the audience. Before either man could think to run, the aircraft touched down and neatly rolled to a halt, still a few paces ahead of them. The engines wound down to a stop. It was, to say the least, an impressive entrance.

Ron couldn't restrain himself and pumped the sky with a fist. "Boo-yah!" he yelled.

"Boo-yah!" Rufus agreed, jumping up and down in excitement.

With a hiss and a click, the aircraft's triangular cockpit canopy tipped back and an unmistakably feminine form stood up. The woman removed her heavy flight helmet and shook out her hip-length red hair. Disdaining the ladder that some technicians were wheeling over, Kim leapt from the aircraft down to the asphalt. Kim paused to kiss her fingers and touch them to the blue fox painted on the nose of the Sabre before jogging over to Ron. Instead of jumping into his arms or doing anything else extrovert, the woman simply reached out to touch the back of his hands with her own. Ron grabbed his wife's hands and grinned at her in a slightly silly way. "Hey, KP, nice flying," Ron said.

"No big," she replied. "It wouldn't have been so easy if you and Wade hadn't put the thing together right in the first place." The former teen heroine smiled at General Hammond. "General, your space fighter is now officially shaken down."

"Well done, Miss Possib… ah… Mrs. Stoppable," Hammond replied. Then, surprisingly, he pulled out a notebook. "This might seem stupid, but could I have your autograph? It is for my granddaughters, you see. They love all the stories about you."

Kim smiled graciously and reached for the notebook.


	6. Consequences

**Sitches Aplenty**

A Repository of KP Shorts

**Disclaimer**

Kim Possible and the characters and situations of the Kim Possible universe were created by Mark McCorkle and Bob Schooley for the Disney Channel and are the copyright of the Walt Disney Corporation. This is a non-profit fan work for free distribution through the world-wide web. No breach of trademark or copyright is intended.

**Author's Notes**

This is going to be a series of short stories where I take Kim Possible, her friends and her enemies places dictated by my own imagination. These short stories are not part of any larger continuity and will only be linked if I specifically say so in my introductory notes.

Censor: T – Moderately detailed description of a judicial execution; extreme discretion advised

Okay, a big departure for me, both thematically and in style. This is by far the darkest story that I've ever written for any fandom. I'm sure that some people will be disturbed by the content of this short, especially towards the end, so _pay attention to the censor warning_! If you have the slightest doubt, don't read it!

This is a stand-alone story. However, its background, specifically Kim and Ron joining the USN and becoming the crew of a fighter, was largely inspired by Nutzkie's 'Thunder Eagles' stories.

**6. Consequences**

Lt. Comdr. Kim Stoppable, USN, walked down the dark hallway and managed not to feel nervous at the brooding presence of the heavily-armed and -armoured Global Justice troopers manning check-points every hundred feet or so.

Frankly, she would rather be anywhere than here. 'Here' being The Pit, Global Justice's beyond-maximum security prison buried into the bedrock of the Rocky Mountains, near the Mexican border. It was here that the UN-operated trans-national police agency held some of the most dangerous human beings behind security so enormous that it was widely reputed that it would take an _army_ to break in to free one of them. It was also a fact that not one person had _ever_ escaped, or even attempted to do so. Kim was here, much against her will, at the request of one particularly dangerous prisoner, a shadow from her past that had somehow continued to haunt her into her adult life.

Kim stopped at another checkpoint, something that looked more like an airlock with two huge armoured sliding doors either side of a short stretch of corridor filled with more scanning equipment and weapons than could be easily enumerated.

"Lieutenant Commander?" asked the faceless GJ trooper inside the hermetically sealed guard's booth. "I will need your ID, Ma'am." Kim flashed her USN ID. After enduring yet another palm-print, retina and voice print scan, Kim was allowed through the check-point and stopped facing another GJ trooper.

The trooper, whose nametag red: 'Coulson, P. F.', was nearly unrecognisable as human inside his or her seven-foot-tall suit of heavy powered armour. Kim couldn't even see his or her face, instead having to endure looking at an anonymous plate with three multi-spectral optical and near-optical scanners like soulless eyes. "Lt. Comdr. Stoppable?" crackled a digitally-masked voice from the armour's speakers. Kim nodded in affirmation. "Ma'am, I am Deputy Warden Paula Coulson. If you will follow me, I will take you to the interview room."

Kim followed the hulking figure down the corridor, listening to the regular muffled 'thump-thump' of the armour's boots as it strode down the corridor. It all seemed excessive. However, Earth's worst super-criminals were held at The Pit, people who could kill with a touch or kill with even a word or even just a look and were quite willing to use that power. The person Kim was coming to visit wasn't quite so dangerous but, there was no doubt, in her own way she was as lethal a foe as any Kim had faced, either as a member of her country's armed forces or in her earlier 'career' as a freelance heroine. Frankly, Kim had hoped that her previous meeting with this particular prisoner, in a special court-room on a military base, would have been her last. However, that was not to be. As much as Kim wished heartily that this person could be forever consigned to her past, she could not in all conscience ignore this final plea. After all, it was bad karma to reject a request from a condemned woman.

Kim walked into what looked startlingly like any interview room in any prison anywhere on Earth. There was a heavy desk (literally fused to the floor), and four uncomfortable-looking fixed chairs, two to either side of the desk. A second armoured door was opposite the one Kim had entered through. There was one big difference: No windows or anything like it. One side of the room was a set of illuminated panels, releasing a range of wavelengths similar to sunlight to maintain the inmates' health despite the fact they were never permitted onto the surface. The Pit was a very special prison, one specifically for those to be forever shut away from the eyes of civilised man and woman.

Kim sat down. On the edge of her hearing, she heard a crackle from behind her that suggested that Coulson was talking to someone on her suit radio. "Ma'am," Coulson announced. "Prisoner 00112 is on the way. I must remind you not to make any physical contact with her or pass over the mid-way line of the room. This is purely a precaution as her metahuman capabilities have been suppressed. However, she is still a lethally-skilled martial artist and is quite capable of killing with her bare hands."

Kim nodded. Of course, she was quite capable of killing with her bare hands too. It was, thank God, a line she had never been forced to cross. However, it was worth remembering that, the two times that she came close to that line, it was due to this woman. Kim looked up as the other hatch slid open. Two armoured GJ troopers came in. Walking in between them, as demure as if this were a walk in the park, seemingly ignoring the fact that she was shackled, hand, foot and throat like a dangerous animal, was a familiar figure with beautiful long, black hair, now with a distinctive silver streak, and the strangest-coloured skin. "Hello, Princess. Or should I call you 'Cap'n Princess' now, sailor-girl?"

Kim glared at Sherlyn Marie Goh, _alias _Shego, with a level of venom that should have reduced the older woman to a diffuse yellow spray. Shego smirked at Kim's expression for a moment before two armoured gauntlets dropped onto her shoulders from either side and rammed her down onto a seat on the opposite side of the table from Kim.

"You know, Shego, if all you wanted was to mock me, then this was a wasted trip."

Shego raised her hands, and Kim noted again the heavy metal gauntlets covering the woman's hands that ensured that, should she attempt to use her plasma casting powers, it would blow her hands off long before she could hurt anyone. "Pax, Princess," Shego drawled. "I didn't call you here to tweak you. I wanted to talk to you." Shego leant back and spent a moment glaring at her shackles and the devices that left her powerless. "I bet it gives you the warm fuzzies, seeing me like this," she muttered bitterly.

Kim shrugged. "You chose the life, Shego. You chose to be one of the world's most dangerous people. Can you blame GJ for treating you appropriately?"

Shego grunted. "I ought to be flattered but..." The older woman smirked at the redheaded heroine dangerously. "On the other hand, I've never been one for taking orders or living how other people want." Kim waited. She knew Shego well enough to know that the other woman would get to the point eventually. "Princess... Kim," she said at last. "Kim... Uh... How is the Side... how is your husband?"

Kim blinked in surprise. _That _was unexpected. "He's fine, Shego. We're both busy teaching classes at Top Gun but we're both enjoying it."

Shego nodded. "I always knew you two would end up being the very best. Assuming you lived long enough." The green-skinned super-villainess looked thoughtfully at her nemesis before continuing. "You know, you owe me a lot."

"_I _owe _you_?" Kim spluttered.

Shego nodded with a dangerous grin. "Oh yeah, Kimmie. Do you think you would be half the woman you are now without me pushing you to excel? Do you think that you would have had the drive to do what it takes if I hadn't taught you how to harness your hatred and use violence like a precision tool? You may be one of the top back-seaters in Naval Aviation, Pumpkin, but you owe it to _me_."

"Well, that's a unique perspective," Kim replied dryly. "If that illusion makes you feel any better, please be my guest. You'll excuse me if I choose _not_ to believe that anything I've achieved is due to anything but my own efforts."

Shego laughed sensually. "Whatever," she said. "The fact is though, that I knew you would be a worthy successor to me from the first time I saw you in action. I've been _moulding_ you Princess. I've been driving you in the right direction so that you would one day be ready to take my place as this planet's top mercenary. That's why I spared your life so many times." Kim's eyebrows shot up. "That's right," Shego said with an infernal grin. "You don't think that a cheerleader with jumped-up illusions of skill was a match for _me_ do you? Hell no! I could have killed you with my first punch, but I saw the _potential_! So I let you and your buffoon live and ensured that you would continue to develop along the same path as me!"

Kim saw red and it took all her self-control not to leap across the table and slap the condescending look of superiority off of Shego's face. After a few deep breaths, she was able to reply. "Shego? What. Do. You. Want?"

"I'm callin' in the debt, Pumpkin," Shego said, leaning back and gesturing airily. "I want you to use all those favours with the 'great and good' you've stacked up over the years to get me a pardon and get me out of this hole."

Kim couldn't help but stare at the woman opposite her in open astonishment. The sheer, unbridled arrogance and effrontery was mind-boggling. "You are _delusional_!" she blurted at last. "Shego, you are responsible for thousands of deaths! You were leading a freaking _terrorist army _when me and Ron finally caught you! Why the _hell_ do you think that I would be willing to help you avoid the needle, let alone let you out into the world at large again?"

There was a 'crash' as Shego slammed the palms of her hands against the heavy metal table. Shego was on her feet, leaning over the table to glare at Kim with fury and terror in her green eyes. "BECAUSE YOU OWE ME!" she shouted.

"Prisoner 00112, stand down," crackled a voice from one of the guards. A very large and very powerful-looking shock-prod was raised and lightning crackled between the prongs on the end of the weapon. Shego glared at the guard in question for a moment before raising her hands in a gesture of surrender and sat down again.

"Because you owe me for all the guidance I've been giving you. You owe me for not killing you and your dumb lover-boy side-kick all those dozens of times when I had the chance. Most importantly, though, because you're _not ready_ yet. You need some more _personal_ instruction before you can take my place."

Kim shook her head. "Shego, news flash here. I don't want to take your place. You are the antitheses of everything that I want to be. Hell, I have _nightmares_ about becoming something like you! I'm on my guard against that step over the edge of the cliff every moment I'm awake!"

Shego snorted. "That's just the remainder of your goody-two-shoes upbringing. Pretty soon, you will work out that there are two sorts of people in this world: The people who take what they want and the people that they take them from. You, my dear Princess, are one of the former. With my help, I'll add to your skills until there is no-one who can stop you. All the wealth, power, excitement and adventure that you ever could want, and all you have to do is seize it!" Shego leaned forward, a slightly desperate edge to her gaze. "Princess, I know things and I know people that no one else can tell you about! There are techniques that only _I _know because I killed the masters who taught me after I learnt all I could. Shadow bank accounts and front companies that would give you the wealth and power to do whatever you want, for good or for ill! A lot more use to you than the rewards in your current job!" Shego gestured contemptuously at the 'fruit salad' of decorations and ribbons on the left breast Kim's uniform blouse.

Kim sighed and sat back in her seat. She wondered exactly why Coulson was allowing this debate to continue. It was possible that the Deputy Warden considered it a 'legitimate' discussion. It was just as possible that the guards were all hoping that either Kim or Shego would break, get physical and give them an excuse to use their powerful deterrent/restraint equipment on one or both of them. "Shego, imagining just for a moment that I actually am interested in this offer of yours, exactly why again do you think that I would want your... well... 'mentoring' for want of a better word?"

Shego laughed, a dangerous and slightly demented sound. "Princess, you might not want to admit it, but you are more than half-way down the path to being a new version of me. Oh, you try to avoid it, but every time you lock on a missile, you are taking another step. Every life taken makes you more and more a like me and less and less like that 'girl scout' mental image you have of yourself." The woman sat back and crossed her arms. "You know that it's true. You also know that I can help you get off the starting blocks. You know that you need me, both to motivate you and to support you. That is why you are going to get me out of here."

Kim sighed and suddenly realised that she pitied this woman far more than she had ever hated her. "Shego, you are reaching," she said at last. Shego stared at Kim. She could not have been more shocked if the younger woman had just announced that she was her long-lost baby sister. "You are so desperate to avoid what is going to happen to you, that you are willing to do anything. Even _beg_ me for my help." Kim chuckled. "_You_! Begging _me_ for help! Boy-oh-boy, I never thought that I'd see _this_ day!" The young woman shook her head. "And, of course, since you don't beg, you must be doing me a favour! Of course! I'm destined to be your apprentice in the way of super-villainy!" Kim laughed aloud this time, shaking her head in disbelief. "Shego, there is _nothing _you can offer me that I want. The only legacy you leave me is that your path is that the one I want to _avoid_. I face a sitch and I ask myself: 'What would Shego do?' Whatever the answer, I do the opposite." Kim leaned forward to glare at her arch-nemesis. "Shego. I do _not_ want to follow your example. Frankly, I would be happier if I never had to think about you ever again in my life."

"You, arrogant, naive, hypocritical IDIOT!" Shego yelled. "The reason you don't want to think about me is because you know you are becoming me and you _fear_ that! You have already come so far!" Shego stood up to glare at Kim. "You listen to me Princess and listen well. You and I? We're both weapons, dangerous ones. We're _killers_. When those in power want someone or something out of the way, they send you or me to do that job. The difference between you and me, the _only_ difference between you and me, is that I kill for _money_, and you kill for a _flag_." Shego sucked in a deep breath before being able to continue. "The fact is, Princess, that the people behind a flag can change and they can stop being honourable. At least a mercenary gets to choose whose money she takes."

There was a long silence as Kim digested Shego's words before she slowly got to her feet and glared at the other woman, eye to eye. "You couldn't be more wrong," she said quietly. "I am not a _killer_, Shego. I'm a _warrior_. I do a duty, a hard one. Yes, that means that, on occasion, I'm called upon to take lives. However, I _never _take joy from the kill. Shego, the people I kill, they've _chosen _to be where they are. They've chosen to fight and to hurt innocent people and if that costs them their lives in turn? Well, that's the choice they've made. You?" Kim snorted and shook her head in contempt. "You kill anyone who gets in your way. You will hurt innocents and destroy lives, either literally or figuratively, to earn your wages and, you know what? I doubt you've had a moment's lost sleep over that." Focussed entirely on their confrontation, neither woman noticed the guards moving in closer, clearly ready to pull them apart if necessary. Kim's voice began to rise and she leant in closer to Shego. "Shego, I've wept for every life I've taken. Can you say the same? I kill because it is the only way to save innocent lives. You? You kill because you _like_ it."

Kim suddenly sat down, hard and put her face in her hands. Shego still stood there, gape mouthed and desperately trying to think of a rebuttal. "I always wondered," Kim said at last, "why you turned to crime. I think I know at last. You did it because you didn't like the restraints on your behaviour that being a superhero demanded. You _wanted_ to be able to hurt people, and take things that you wanted and to _kill_." Kim looked up again and glared at Shego. "I could never imagine having that mindset, Shego. That is why you have _nothing _to offer me. _Nothing at all_." Kim stood, stepped away from the table and turned to Coulson. "Ms. Coulson, I think we're done here."

The guards all moved at once, the two flanking Shego grabbing her shoulders. Shego began to thrash wildly, trying to shake the pitiless powered gauntlets off of her. "Kim, you have to help me! Don't you understand? They're going to _KILL _ME!"

Kim looked at Shego's suddenly tear-filled eyes and paused. Finally she nodded. "I know," she said. "And that's what this is really about, isn't it? You're finally going to have to face a punishment you can't escape from for your actions, and you're_ afraid_." She sighed. "Shego, you've done things... things I can't imagine any sane person being able to live with. You've been directly or indirectly responsible for thousands of deaths. Drakken's Diablo-bots killed just short of a hundred-thousand people. They wouldn't have existed without _you_. You helped supply advanced weapons to insurgents in Afghanistan and Pakistan, most of which were used in terrorist attacks against civilian targets. You personally led a pirate navy in the Arabian Sea against merchant shipping. When we caught up with you, you were running a mercenary _army_ intended to 'purge' the Horn of Africa of those populations Drakken and Hench didn't want in their new 'base of operations'."

"I was... I was just doing my job!" Shego nearly whispered

"'A mercenary gets to choose whose money she takes.' Those were your words to me just now, Shego." Kim glared at the other woman, who took an instinctive step back in sudden fear. "I've lost count of the number of times you've broken out of jail, Shego. Every time you've had a chance to turn your life around, you've gone right back to doing the same. No! Actually, you went on to _worse_! Well, now the time has come to pay the piper. This is the moment when you face the _consequences_ for what you have done."

"Kimmie..."

"NO, Shego," Kim interrupted, her hand slicing through the air in a cutting motion. "If I had even the slightest hope that, in time, you could be rehabilitated, I'd petition for a waiving of the death penalty. I don't have that hope Shego. You've as good as told me how proud you are of what you have become. I couldn't let something like that back out into the world." Shego was reduced to a gape-mouthed silence. Kim looked at her with pity and compassion. "Shego, you chose your path. You chose to become a villain because you _wanted _that life. Every choice has its consequences, Shego. That's one of the earliest and hardest lessons that I have had to learn in this line of work. The time has come for _you _to face the consequences of _your _choices. The only thing that I can do for you is to ask that you try to face it with humility and dignity. Try... Try to make your peace with God before the end."

Kim turned away and walked away. Coulson stepped aside and gestured for Kim to precede her out into the corridor. Behind her, Kim heard a scuffle, the clinking of chains and the thud of flesh on metal (and vice versa).

"Kim Stoppable! Come back you little self-righteous _bitch_! No one turns their back on me! I will get out of here and I will _get you_ Kim Stoppable! You hear me? You haven't heard the last of _me_! Even if I have to come back as a ghost to haunt... You get off of me you..." There was a crackle of electricity and Kim heard Shego scream in agony. "Get... Kimmie... Kimmie help me! Kimmie, I'm _scared_! Please save me, Kimmie! PLEASE!" Another crackle and another throat-shredding scream.

Kim Stoppable acted as if she could not hear the threats and pleas. She never turned back. She never looked back. She just walked straight on, out of The Pit and into the future.

* * *

Kim's C-21 Gulfstream set down at NAS Miramar two hours later. She stepped off its integral boarding steps and onto the tarmac and looked up in time to see two F/A-28 Crusader stealth fighter-bombers scream past on their way out to the training range for ACM (Air Combat Manoeuvres) exercises.

After signing back in at the base office, she walked through to the MOQs (Married Officer Quarters). The small bungalow that was her and her husband's home-away-from-home was quiet and empty. This wasn't too surprising as it was only about 1630 hours right now. Of course, she was booked off duty for the day, so she had nowhere to go right now. She made a cup of the camomile tea that her mother swore always calmed her nerves and just sat in the semi-darkened kitchen nook, lost in thought.

It was thus that her husband found her, hours later. She felt his warm lips touch the side of her throat and she purred slightly.

"Hey, KP," he said, laughter as always in his voice.

"Hey, Ron. How was the day?"

"Oh, the usual," Ron replied easily. "Lots of newbies who think that they're the hottest hand ever to touch a stick who needed to be shown the error of their ways." Ron sat down next to his wife, WSO and best friend. "What did she want?"

"She wanted me to spring her from jail," Kim replied. "She thought that I wanted to be her." Kim couldn't help but grin at Ron's reaction. Then the grin faded; Shego's words having resurrected an old, old fear. "Ron… am I a killer?"

Ron sighed and took his wife's hands in his own. "Kim, we've been through this so many times before."

"Do it again."

Ron nodded with a slight smile. "Kim, you couldn't be a killer if you tried. Just like Mrs. Dr. P always says, you don't have enough hate in you to _want_ to kill. You do what you have to do, and then you carry the guilt. You've got a conscience and you carry everything you have to do in there. I've caught you crying in the middle of the night, no matter how hard you try to stop yourself from waking me. Shego could never be like that. I don't think that she could be sorry for what she's done if she tried."

Kim smiled at Ron and squeezed his hands. "I love you, Ron."

"I love you too, Kim."

* * *

"_Sherlyn Marie Goh. As per section 4, subsection a, paragraph 1 of the Uniform Federal Criminal Code, the Warden of Deep Rock Federal Penitentiary is hereby directed to carry out on this date the sentence decided upon by the UN World Court on 4__th__ August 2010. Do you have any final statement that you wish to have added to the record at this time?_"

Shego glared up at the Warden defiantly as she listened to him deliver the formal notice. "Spare me," she spat. "You aren't going to be allowed to do this, so why even bother with this _charade_?"

The Warden, anonymous in his power armour, seemed unimpressed. "I'll take that as meaning 'no'," he said, a smirk all-too audible in his voice. "Guards, escort the prisoner to the chamber."

Two GJ troopers stepped forwards and grabbed Shego, yanking her to her feet. "Whoa! Not so fast! Would it help if I said I haven't finished my last meal?"

"A PBJ Sandwich barely classifies as a 'last meal', Ms. Go," the Warden remarked.

"Hey! Don't dis PBJ! I happen to have good memories of that snack!"

Shego, hobbled with shackles and clearly annoyed at being dragged from her cell, walked as best as she could down the Green Mile. The Pit was always eerily quiet, with every prisoner's cell being practically in its own self-contained block. However, today, there was something _oppressive_ in the air. Shego sucked in a breath, determined not to allow her nervousness to show.

"I have to say that the Princess is cutting this fine," she said conversationally. "Did she tell you guys to make me think that you're actually going to go through with it to teach me a lesson or something?" The guards gave no reply. "Sparkling conversationalists, _not_," she grumbled.

After passing through a couple of security checkpoints, the guards led Shego into a medium-sized octagonal room with a huge two-way mirror taking up an entire wall. Another two armoured guards were waiting inside and a third armoured figure whose lime green armour marked him as a GJ field medic. Shego looked around at the fittings of the room. If anything they seemed more medical than something one would find in a penitentiary. Of course, Shego was no fool; she knew what they were for. "Okay, guys, very funny," she said, her voice slightly strained. "I'm shaking in my booties. Now let's get to the discharge wing so I can get out of here." Shego looked at the two-way mirror. "Okay, Princess, this is very authentic. I'm really frightened; your practical joke is a great success! Now out you come! Let's get this over with!"

The pitiless metal gauntlets grabbed Shego's shoulder and pulled her backward towards a 'Lazy-T'-shaped bed that was set into the concrete floor at the centre of the room. "Hey! Get off! This isn't right! I've been pardoned!"

"Ms. Goh," the Warden said levelly as the guards began to undo Shego's shackles. "No pardon has been received. Nor, so I understand it, has either the President or General Secretary's Office received a petition for one."

"No, that isn't right!" Shego's voice suddenly became thick with panic. "It can't be! GET OFF OF ME!" The woman suddenly lashed out, sheer adrenaline-fuelled fear enabling her to slam one 500lb exo-suited guard into another. She managed to get two strides towards the door before a third guard clotheslined her. As the green-skinned woman staggered back, the power-assisted gauntlets closed around her wrists again, dragging her back towards the death table.

Shego began to scream and thrash. Clawing hopelessly at the guards as they strapped her left wrist to the table and trying to kick out. "No! _No! _The Princess was going to get me a pardon! She was going to help me! She knows that she _needs _me! She won't let you kill me! _She NEEDS me!_"

With an annoyed grunt, one of the guards jabbed Shego in the side with his shock prod. Shego screamed and convulsed, temporarily losing control of her voluntary motor functions. Before she knew what was happening, she was shackled to the table, her arms and legs slightly spread. As she looked on in horror, the medic professionally pulled up the sleeve of her orange prison uniform, swabbed the inside of her elbow with some rubbing alcohol and slid a hypodermic infusion needle, attached to a rack of three remote-controlled syringes on the wall, into the vein there and then fastened it down with a length of medical tape.

"No-no-no-no…" Shego babbled. "No, you don't have to do this! You don't! I'll be a good girl, I promise! I'll be good! Tell the Princess I'll be good! You tell her! Please! Please, I'm scared and I don't want to do this! Please don't hurt me! I'll be good! Please no! Don't do this, please, please, don't! Please call Kimmie! Call my brothers! Call _anyone_! Tell them I'll be good please…!"

Warden Hodges looked at the 'Zulu' clock of military time projected onto his suit's HUD and noted that the hour had come, as per his orders. He looked over at the doctor, who nodded and stepped back from the restrained prisoner. The woman had refused the services of a priest or any other religious adviser, claiming 'not to believe in all that trash' and loudly declaring that she wasn't answerable to anyone. Well, she was about to find out whether that was true. He sent the unique twelve-digit alphanumeric code to the room's control computer to begin the execution sequence.

"No-no-no! Please no! Please don't! I'm scared! I don't want to die! Please _no_! Please tell Kimmie I'll be good! Please, please, please… pl… please… plea…" The first hypodermic injected a powerful muscle relaxant. Shego's body went limp and she sagged against the soft cushions of the table. She no longer had enough voluntary muscular control to speak but the Warden could see her lips trembling. Hodges fancied himself as a decent lip-reader. Through all the pleas, threats and demands, the one phrase than never passed the prisoner's lips was "I'm sorry."

The second hypodermic delivered a powerful general anaesthetic that was designed to put the prisoner into a coma-like sleep in which no awareness of events was possible. Almost five years ago, it had been decided that it was inhumane for a prisoner to have to feel death come up upon them, so this intermediate stage had been included in the procedure.

The last thing Shego saw before the anaesthetic caused her eyes to slide shut was the maddeningly silent phone through which any late order to stop the procedure would come.

The final hypodermic began to pump down, pushing a lethal dose of chemicals into the prisoner's system intended to disable her autonomic nervous system, causing her organs to simultaneously shut down. Shego's breathing slowed, grew shallower and finally stopped. After a few moments of stillness, Hodges nodded at the doctor who stepped forward, pulling a life-signs scanner off of a magnetic clip on his armour's hip guards.

Suddenly, Shego's body was surrounded by a bright nimbus of green-white light! The Green Glow! Hodges had only ever seen videos of Shego's power at work and was caught between fear and awe now. Arcs of green-white plasma flared off of the aura around the woman's body, grounding itself on the metal supports of the table, the medical equipment and even the armour of the guards.

The guards had drawn their blast pistols and levelled them at the prisoner's inert body. Then, as suddenly as it came, the glow began to fade, growing paler and less distinct. Finally, there was little more than a few arcs of green light that seemed to blow away like smoke on a breeze. In its wake, Shego began to change. He hair lightened from black to chestnut brown and her skin lost its alien green coloration, bleaching until it became a normal Caucasian skin tone.

Hodges was on his guard. Team Go all had one power in common – a powerful healing factor that could quickly repair even the most disabling of injuries. Could it even bring her back from the dead? "Doctor?"

The doctor stepped forward and scanned the prisoner's body. "No respiration. No pulse. Blood pressure falling off quickly. Body temperature also beginning to drop." The doctor leaned forward and opened one of the woman's eyes. Her chocolate brown irises were fully dilated and were unresponsive to the light he shone in them. He pulled a small probe from his medical pack and jabbed it into the centre of the prisoner's left palm. There was no reflexive twitch in response. "No life signs. Prisoner 00112, Goh, S. M. declared dead at 1218 Zulu on this date."

* * *

For someone who had touched so many lives, mostly for the worse, the burial of Sherlyn Marie Goh in a small cemetery in Go City near Team Go Tower was a remarkably quiet affair. Apart from a Catholic priest from a the parish church where she was christened, the only attendees at the graveside were a few law enforcement officials who seemed more concerned to ensure that the woman was put into the ground quickly and without fuss.

After the priest had offered a few final words and a plea for mercy to a God toward whom the deceased had certainly no reverence and no fear, the grave was filled in and was then left unattended.

Kim Stoppable, her Navy dress uniform partly covered by her raincoat (it had, at least, been a suitably dull day with the occasional rain-shower). Kim walked over to her nemesis's grave and looked at it. It seemed strangely appropriate that someone who had so valued her independence should now be so utterly alone and forsaken by almost everyone. The grave was marked by a standard pauper's marker, a simple varnished wooden cross with a small brass plaque with a brief inscription giving the deceased's name, date of birth and death. On the grave itself were two wreaths, a professional but rather impersonal one with an unsigned Team Go business card and a small arrangement with a card in the name of Mama Lipsky.

Kim noted that Shego was almost exactly ten years older than her, just a few weeks short of her 39th birthday when she died. She found herself wondering where _she_ would be in ten years time.

"KP. Why did you come here?" Ron wanted to know.

Kim shrugged. "I don't know. Closure, I suppose." The redheaded woman sighed. "Should I have saved her, Ron?"

Ron shook his head. "KP, Shego walked dozens of miles of bad road to get here. She never once was sorry for any of the people that she hurt. I don't think that anything could have changed her. If she had lived, she would have tried to escape. If she had escaped, she would have gone right on walking that bad road."

"I suppose you're right," Kim said. "It's weird though. She's _finally _gone for good! When I was a teen, I focussed on her and how I could beat her so much that sometimes…" Kim paused, shook her head and laughed. "Sometimes I wondered if I was falling for her!"

Ron made a spluttering sound. "KP! No fair putting an image like that in my head!"

Kim laughed. "Now, though. That last time I saw her, I couldn't even _hate_ her any more. All she could have been. All the _good_ she could have done. All of it thrown away! Yet, in the end, she was like a child trying to avoid being spanked for being naughty. I… _pitied_ her."

Ron put a hand on his wife's shoulder. "You couldn't have saved her, Kim. Someone needs to _want_ to be saved and she didn't want to be."

Kim nodded. "I won't feel guilty about this," she promised. "Shego did what she wanted to do and she paid the price for her choices. The best and last victory I can have in my life is to put her behind me and never let her shadow affect my life in any way."

Ron smiled and put his arm around his wife's shoulders. As he directed her away from the graveside and towards their car, they both noticed the figure in a trench coat step out from under the trees. The figure stood over Shego's grave for a few long moments before leaning down and pulling out a hammer and a wooden stake. As Kim and Ron looked on, dumbfounded, the man hammered the stake into the earth at approximately heart level. As he turned to go, both the Naval Aviators saw the violet Team Go uniform.

Kim shook her head. "Take me home, Ron," she said.


	7. BONUS Odyssey Preview

**Odyssey**

A Kim Possible Story

**Disclaimer**

Kim Possible and the characters and situations of the Kim Possible universe were created by Mark McCorkle and Bob Schooley for the Disney Channel and are the copyright of the Walt Disney Corporation. This is a non-profit fan work for free distribution through the world-wide web. No breach of trademark or copyright is intended.

The lyrics of 'Guide Me Orion' were written by Gordon 'Flash' Smith of Flaming Youth for the album 'Ark-2'.

**Author's Notes**

This is a preview of an upcoming multi-chapter KP story that I'm currently working on. No schedule at the moment (I am never sure when the inspiration bunny will bite) but I hope to have the full thing up before too long.

Censor: K+

**Chapter 1 – Exodus**

_**"Stay", said the bird. "Stay, stay!"  
As the summer midnight passes,  
And the rosy dawn is fingering the eastern sky,  
"Enjoy the day!"**_

…

Dr. Anne Possible edged her way along the row of seats in the great viewing stands set up on the other side of the lagoon from Launch Complex 40 at the Kennedy Space Centre, Florida, USA. Her face lit up with a smile as she spied a familiar face. "Barbara! Hey!"

"Anne! It's good to see you!" Barbara Stoppable stood up to embrace the redheaded neurosurgeon. Thanks to Kim's close relationship with Ron, the two families had found themselves spending a lot of time together. However, over the years, the two woman had become more then friends, indeed almost family. Although they would never admit it to their children, the two women had become a vital support structure to each other. Anne had lost count of the number of times she and Barbara had spent sleepless nights sitting in one or the other of their living rooms, sustained by coffee and fear, waiting for news of their children to be brought to them by either Wade or Global Justice; praying that the news would not be bad.

"I can't believe that the day has finally come," Anne said as she sat down next to her friend under the blazing Floridean sun. "This has been hanging in the background the whole time whilst Kim was in college. Now it's finally here, I keep on having to tell myself that it isn't a dream!"

"A dream?" Barbara said, wringing her hands nervously, obviously holding herself together by will alone. Anne wasn't sure if she was meant to hear the blonde woman's next words. "Maybe a _nightmare_."

_**

* * *

**_

And the dew on the spider's web,  
And the dappled light under oak and ash.  
Why leave the ocean's swell and the seaweed shore,  
And the white-spread gull, the limpet shell?

…

"Ron? Gum?"

"Oh… sorry guys!" Ron Stoppable tried to fish his chewing gum out of his mouth but, wearing the thick gloves of his orange-and-black ACES-III pressure suit, that was basically impossible. A grinning, clean-suited Space-X technician stuck out his hand and Ron, looking incredibly embarrassed, spat the offending bit of flavoured rubber out onto it.

"No problem, man," the technician said, dropping the gum into a trash receptacle.

"Are you ready Kimmie-cub?" Dr. James Possible asked his firstborn child.

Kim Possible, lying back on the couch on her side of the Crew Preparation Area, smiled up at her clean-suited father. "Ready and rarin' to go," she confirmed with her usual confident grin.

To emphasise the point, Rufus, sitting on a mini-couch on a table in between Kim and Ron's preparation areas (in the world's first Naked Mole Rat-sized pressure suit), shot the Possible patriarch a thumbs-up. "Hyuk! Rarin' to go!"

James looked down at his daughter and had to remind himself that she was twenty-two now and had long ago proven that she was capable of making her own choices… and facing (and surmounting) challenges that would cow most grown men. He wasn't sure if the feeling that was in his heart was worry for his daughter or a certain degree of jealousy that she was about to embark on an adventure that, truth be told, he would sell a limb to enjoy. He looked down at Kim and couldn't help but reach out and stroke her cheek affectionately.

Kim, as good-hearted as always, sensed her father's mixed feelings. "I'm okay, Daddy," she whispered with a smile. "I'm going to make you proud of me."

James smiled. "Kimmie-cub… I've always been proud of you. Every day you've been alive, I've been proud of you. Never forget that."

Ron stood up from his couch and stretched his arms, rotating them around so he was sure he had full freedom of movement (or as far as that was available in a pressure suit). The tall young man, so changed and matured from the lanky non-conformist that James still remembered from Kimmie-cub's school years, stood still as the technicians put on the cap containing his communication headset and then locked on his white helmet. "Y'know, this is the coolest thing ever," Ron remarked. "It's like… I dunno… being in _Commander Constellation _or _Astro Journey_ or somethin'."

"Yeah," Kim remarked as she stood up to have her own helmet attached. "The big difference is that this is for _real_, Ron. No chance to re-shoot the scene if you miss a cue!"

Ron laughed. "Gotcha, KP. Game face on. I've got your back."

Kim smiled with genuine affection. "And I've got yours."

_**

* * *

**_

The thin heady air of the mountain's peak,  
And the stream that swells to a river's spate?  
And the garden, walled, with the scent of thyme,  
And the furrowed field, where the foxes lie?

…

"There they are! There!" Tara King nearly jumped out of her seat and pointed frantically at the TV screen where Kim and Ron, resplendent in their space suits, walked out of the Astronaut Preparation Facility to the waiting NASA silver panel van. A massive cheer rose from the crowd, many of whom had known Kim throughout her school career.

At the back of the main hall of the Middleton Community Centre. Monique Jenkins paced nervously. "Oh man," she was murmuring to herself. "Oh man, oh man, oh man."

"Get over yourself, Jenkins," Bonnie Rockwaller sneered from where she was nonchalantly leaning against the back wall. "So K is finally going to get _permanently_ out of our hair! Big deal!"

Monique glared at the self-proclaimed 'Queen B' of Middleton High and thought of how much more pleasing the teal-eyed brunette would look with four deep scratch marks marring her perma-tanned cheeks. "You know," she spat at last, "I'd take offence if it weren't so pathetic how _jealous_ you are!"

"Jealous?" Bonnie hooted. "You're as certifiable as K is!"

"Yeah, jealous," Monique replied. "Because Kim is going to do something that will put her name in the history books forever, as if it weren't already there!"

"If you're so pleased about this," Bonnie spat back, "then why are you so nervous?"

Monique drew in a deep breath before fixing the other young woman with a deadly glare. "I know that you couldn't possibly understand, Bonnie, but I'll say it anyway. That is my BFGF and the kindest, most goofy and good-naturedly heroic guy I've ever met out there, about to be launched into space to do something no one has ever done before. Now, think about it, girl… why _would_ I be nervous?" Monique sighed. "Why are you here if you aren't interested, Bonnie?"

Bonnie swallowed, unable to reply. Monique saw the other young woman's eyes dart to the TV screen and knew that she was worried and wanted to give Kim and Ron her support, even though she'd rather die than say so aloud.

Back at the front of the crowd, Kevin Medley found himself wondering if it was possible for the tiny former cheerleader and up-and-coming model and dancer sitting next to him to crush his fingers from the strength of her grip. He tried to squeeze Tara's hands back. "She'll be okay, Tara," he murmured. "Everyone knows how good Kim is."

"Yeah," Tara said with a shaky smile. _God, if you are listening… look out for Ron too…_

_**

* * *

**_

Remember friends and loves and familiar scenes,  
And the sad sweet echoes of another time,

…

"You're crazy, Princess," Sherylin Goh, _alias_ Shego whispered as she glared at the big-screen plasma TV in the rec. room in Drakken's new lair. "Brave as hell, ambitious to match and thinkin' big… but I still say you're crazy."

"Shego, why are we doing nothing?" Shego winced slightly at the loud voice and turned around to face her employer, Dr. Drew Lipsky, _alias_ Dr. Drakken. "Kim Possible and her pet buffoon are going into the face of incredible peril and we are doing nothing to get them permanently out of our hair! Why?"

Shego looked at Drakken's thinning but well combed-over pate and briefly considered making a comment about him not having _that_ much hair for Kimmie to be in but decided against it. _Too easy_, she concluded. "Well, Doc, what do you think we should be doing?"

"Their spacecraft's parking orbit will pass over the lair!" Drakken said. "We should have stolen a laser to destroy them once and for all as they flew overhead! In fact, I'm sure that I could throw something together even now…"

Drakken was about to turn to leave the rec. room when Shego grabbed him and swung him back around. The blue-skinned mad scientist found himself being held, practically on tip-toe, by the high collar of his coat with a clawed hand, surrounded by arcs of green plasma, held just in front of his nose. "You are _not_ going to do anything, Doc. Is that clear?"

"What? Shego! Put me down! Possible is vulnerable and we do nothing? Why?"

"Because if we do something in as public a setting as this, they will _never stop hunting us_!" Shego spat, dangerously, even _murderously_ quiet. "We'll be the most hated people on Earth and we won't find shelter _anywhere_! Not even the other villains would dare touch us! Hell, they'd probably kill us both themselves to prove that they can 'keep their house in order'!" Shego dropped Drakken and stood back. "The Princess is going to be playing against the odds this time, Doc," she said, he voice returned to its normal sultry, slightly mocking tone. "With a little luck, we won't _have_ to do anything. Mama Nature and the Laws of Physics will do it for us."

Shego turned back to watch the live rolling coverage as the small convoy of vehicles drove towards LC-40A. "I still don't see why we can't do something to make _sure_," Drakken whined petulantly from behind her.

"Because I say so," Shego said. Then, in the deepest part of her heart, a voice that she rarely heard anymore added: _Because this is something worthwhile. Something wholly good and constructive that will ultimately make the whole world a better place and I'll be damned if I am part of allowing it to become a tragedy_. _It's something that I would have wanted to do myself… once._

Suddenly, Shego was on her feet and was striding for the door. "Where are you going, Shego?" Drakken asked.

"Out."

"Out? Where? When you will be back?"

"None of your damn business and when I feel like it." _And when I can bear to look at your face and hear your voice again you base little maggot._

_**

* * *

**_

And the scents and sounds of a childhood gone.  
"Stay" said the bird "Oh stay, stay…"

…

"Oof!" Ron couldn't help grunt in discomfort as the pad technician yanked back hard on the seat restraint to make sure it was at full extension before clipping it in place across his chest. Kim, typical for her, didn't utter even a peep of protest at the rough handling as the technicians strapped the three field members of Team Possible into the Dragon capsule that would be their ride away from and back to the surface of Earth.

"Ms. Possible? Mr. Stoppable?" There was a significant and annoyed noise made by the capsule's third occupant that made Ron and Kim grin slightly. "Er… and Mr… er… Rufus. You're all set. We're going to start the close-out now."

Kim sucked in a deep breath and tried to remain calm. She looked up through the glass visor of her helmet at her father, framed by the capsule's hatchway, and reached out to him. Two gloved hands met and gripped briefly before Dr. James Possible stood back and allowed the Space-X and CCAFS technicians to swing the Dragon spacecraft's hatch shut. There was a pause and then a loud 'clang' as the locking bolts snapped into place, creating an airtight seal.

"Well… guess there's no turning back now, KP," Ron said in the sudden silence of the capsule's interior.

"Not quite yet, Ron," Kim replied absently as she looked at the multiple MFD screens on the control panel in front of her. It looked identical to the simulator at the Middleton Space Centre, but, of course, this was _real_. She, Ron and Rufus were on top of several thousand gallons of RP-1 and liquid oxygen (and in the hypergolic RCS engines a lethal witches' brew of hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide). In just a few minutes, all this highly explosive fluid was going to be _deliberately_ ignited to launch herself and her boyfriend into orbit on the first leg of the longest journey a human had ever carried out.

Kim had always been proud of her professional demeanour and calm. She had always attempted to be prepared and to give the impression of confidence. However, right now, she was willing to admit to intense nervousness and self-doubt. No one had done this before. _No one_. Hell, the last humans to leave LEO had been in her grandparents' time! Even then, it had been only for one or two weeks! This was going to be a hundred times bigger!

"Hey, KP!" Kim looked over to Ron, who was seated on the other side of the capsule with Rufus, in a cute 'belly down' Naked Mole Rat-sized couch, in between them. "KP, like I always say, I got your back! This is big, but I know you can do it."

Kim smiled at her BFBF and allowed herself to relax. If there was one thing that she had learnt in the years since she had started out on the hero-biz, it was that, with Ron at her side, she could do anything. She remembered again why she did this. Mr. Nakasumi was right: The world _needed_ a guiding light, something to remind them that _anything_ was possible if only you dared to dream and do.

"Hnuk! No big!" Rufus remarked nonchalantly.

Kim's smile grew larger. "No, Rufus," she said. "This _is_ THE big. It is _so_ the drama! And that is why we are doing it!" The Girl Who Could Do Anything flexed her hands once and grasped the two control joysticks, focussing her eyes on the spaceship's instruments. "Game on," she whispered to herself.

_**

* * *

**_

Here is the scale for your leaping dream.

**  
**_**Here is your life and your resting place…**_

…

"_We are go for launch! T-minus one minute, thirty seconds._"

Barbara's hand closed around Anne's with almost painful intensity.

"_T-minus one minute and counting._"

Inside the capsule, Kim and Ron's eyes roamed the various computer screens as the Falcon-9 ELV began to come to life beneath them. "This is it," Kim called out. "Find something to grab onto people, because it's a bumpy ride from here on in!"

"_T-minus forty-five seconds. LAS system armed and enabled_." Instinctively, Ron looked up at the window in front of him, covered by the hard metal-and-plastic structure of the LAS, which would pull him and his GF away from the rocket should the LV go up like one of the Tweebs' more spectacularly unsuccessful experiments. He blinked and focussed his eyes back on the life support and engine health displays in front of him. KP couldn't fly this bird by herself and he swore, a long time ago, that she could always rely on him.

"_T-Minus thirty seconds. Engine health check completed and OK. Fuel tank pressurisation complete. Thrust vectoring system check completed; main engines aligned for lift-off. T-minus fifteen seconds. Oxygen tank pressurisation complete. _

_"T-minus fifteen seconds. Fuel and oxygen pumps start_…"

Barbara and Anne were amongst over 3,000 people on the grandstands who stood as one as the last few seconds count down. Every eye was fixed on the silvery metal spike of the Falcon-9 on the distant launch pad, surrounded by the skeletal towers of the lightning protection system.

Anne could feel her friend's hands trembling in hers.

_"T-minus ten seconds, nine, eight, seven, ignition sequence start…_"

There was an upward lurch inside the Dragon's cockpit followed by a slight harmonic shudder and a rising growling whine as hundreds of gallons of RP-1 and LOX were mixed together and ignited ever second…

"_Four… three… two… one… Lift off! Lift off of the Odyssey mission!_"

…

_**And the wood fell quiet, and into the sky,  
A new bird rose on a plume of fire.**_

…

Poised seemingly on a spark of light gathered from the sun itself, the Falcon-9 ELV rose into the sky, clearing the top of its support tower in a matter of seconds. It rose up, up, up into the cloudless sky, every eye and dozens of cameras following its ascent.

Anne felt her heart rising with the distant spacecraft. Suddenly, she felt a wonder that she hadn't felt since she saw Kimmie for the first time twenty-two long years ago. "Go, honey," she whispered. "Go!" To her right, Barbara began to shudder and her face twisted, unable to decide whether to start crying or cheering as the only child of her flesh left the world of his birth behind.

In one of the press booths at the launch site, Summer Gayle of Channel 5, Middleton, watched as the rocket carrying two young people whose lives she had followed, professionally and personally, for nearly eight years, climbed up into the heavens. By now, Summer was an old hand at live TV commentary. She could give a live blow-by-blow account of a battle with alien monsters or giant robots as if she were reading from a script. None of that experience prepared her for the sheer wave of emotion that she felt at this moment. All she could do was look up and whisper into her microphone: "They look so lonely up there…"


	8. Don't Leave Me Alone

**Sitches Aplenty**

A Repository of KP Shorts

**Disclaimer**

Kim Possible and the characters and situations of the Kim Possible universe were created by Mark McCorkle and Bob Schooley for the Disney Channel and are the copyright of the Walt Disney Corporation. This is a non-profit fan work for free distribution through the world-wide web. No breach of trademark or copyright is intended.

**Author's Notes**

This is going to be a series of short stories where I take Kim Possible, her friends and her enemies places dictated by my own imagination. These short stories are not part of any larger continuity and will only be linked if I specifically say so in my introductory notes.

Censor: T – Just for safety's sake

The third instalment of my 'Next Generation' storyline. Another member of the Next Generation is introduced and Shego comes to a tough realisation about her past and her family.

**7. Don't Leave Me Alone**

_As Shego looked on, the first hypodermic automatically began to infuse a muscle relaxant into her veins. Suddenly, she was robbed of strength and could only lie motionless on the table to which she had been strapped. Somehow, she managed to twist her head to look at the maddeningly silent 'phone mounted on the wall of the death chamber, knowing in her heart that there would be no last-minute reprieve._

_The second hypodermic began to empty into her, pumping in the sedative that would send Shego into her last sleep. Her heartbeat was pounding in her ears; Her breathing was loud and harsh; Blackness was working its way in from the corners of her vision as she felt the drifting feeling of incipient unconsciousness…_

_No…_

_NO…_

"_NOOO!!!_" Sherylin Goh, once known as 'Shego', snapped upright on her bed, drenched in sweat, her silk sheets bunched up around her legs from her unconscious thrashing. The black-haired woman stared around her, still unsure of her surroundings, panting and her heart pounding like a trip-hammer in her chest. Suddenly, she felt a bitter, burning sensation in the back of her throat. The woman staggered from her bed, nearly falling flat on her face because of the sheets still tangled around her legs. Somehow, she got into the upstairs bathroom and to the toilet bowl before her stomach started to purge itself.

After nearly a minute of uncontrollable spasms, Sherylin finally was able to regain some control of her body. The woman fell back against the wall of the bathroom, pulled her pyjama-clad legs up against her chest, wrapped her arms around her knees, bowed her head and began to cry.

_God! This is the fourth time this week! _Every night, the nightmare had been the same: Being dragged into the death chamber of some maximum security prison. Being strapped down by those horrific guards (were they armoured humans or some kind of robot?). Watching helplessly as the hypodermics pumped the execution chemicals into her system. Worse still in its own way were the strange, paradoxical views of _her own funeral_, with no one having cared enough to come to mourn her.

_What is this? Some kind of karmic guilt trip for the years I spent as a villain? Worse, is it some kind of premonition?_ Then and there, Sherylin swore to go to her solicitors the very next day to ensure that her affairs were in order. If Global Justice were to decide that she were too dangerous to leave alive, then she wanted to make sure that her affairs were in order, especially with regard to…

"Mama! Are you okay? What's wrong?"

Sherylin looked up at that most important responsibility. Amy was standing at the door of the bathroom, bathed in the light. The little girl looked half-asleep but was alert enough to be looking around the bathroom frantically, trying to work out what was wrong with her mother, whilst holding her beloved 'CuddleBuddy', Rhinoger, to her chest protectively.

"A… Amy?" Sherylin tried to suck down her sobs but she couldn't. "G… Go to bed, Treasure… Mom… Mommy isn't feeling well, but you shouldn't worry a… abou… about her."

Amy stepped forwards and knelt before her mother. As Sherylin looked on, the almost-five-year-old girl's hands were suddenly surrounded by a soothing nimbus of royal purple light, the same colour as the girl's eyes, which seemed to glow too. Amy's hands slowly drifted over her mother's body and the girl's forehead puckered with thought. "You're not hurt, but you're hurting! Why Mama? What's wrong?"

Sherylin was torn between frustration at her inability to protect Amy from what she was beginning to fear was an incipient mental or emotional breakdown and awe at the sight of her daughter's powers at work. _I wonder if someone's telling me something – the woman with the most destructive powers in Team Go has a daughter whose powers are completely pacific_. The black-haired woman sucked in a deep breath and managed to steady her voice to address her daughter. "Mama had a bad dream, Treasure," she admitted at last.

Amy nodded thoughtfully. "Is it gone now?" she asked.

Although Sherylin didn't think so, she managed to nod and smile reassuringly at the most important thing in her life.

After washing her face and a quick rinse with mouthwash to get the taste of puke out, she led her slightly too-serious daughter back to her bedroom. She tucked Amy into bed, caressed the girl's face and offered her a reassuring smile before returning to her own bedroom.

Sherylin made a perfunctory attempt to fix the sheets on her bed but she doubted that she would get any more sleep tonight. The panic reaction had faded, thank God, but the images remained imprinted on her eyelids. The guards, the execution chamber, the horrible and the insidious numbness spreading through her body. Then there was the funeral, with that self-centred _bastard_ Mego hammering a stake into her grave as if she were some kind of inhuman _beast_ that had to be prevented from rising from the dead to haunt her family again.

She sighed. Of course, she couldn't blame her brothers if they felt that way about her. Mostly out of what she now realised was essentially acting out a petulant teenage rebellion, she had become the worst kind of criminal and made the Team Go colours a symbol of betrayal rather than hope. The black haired woman leant back against her pillows. It wasn't _fair_! She was trying to turn her life around! She had a daughter to care for and, as far as she was a judge, she was doing a good job of it! Hell, she hadn't even _used_ her powers for over a year!

"Scoot over, Mama!"

Sherylin blinked at her daughter, who, still clutching Rhinoger, was standing at her bedside. "Amy, why aren't you in bed?"

It was difficult to tell in the darkened bedroom, but Sherylin suspected that Amy rolled her eyes. "I'm gonna sleep with you, Mama!" Sherylin blinked. "That way, if the bad dreams come back, I can chase them away!"

Sherylin suddenly felt tears in her eyes. That was what she did for Amy on the infrequent occasions the girl had nightmares – hold her as she fell asleep, assuring her that if the bad dreams came back, her fearless mother would 'chase them away'. Once again, she realised that, if she were to have any kind of redemption, it would, in one way or another, be through Amy. "Thank you, Amy," she said sincerely before scooting over, as requested.

* * *

"Okay, Sheg… Ms. Goh," Bonnie Rockwaller announced as she handed the black-haired woman a duplicate of the document that they had just prepared together. "This is water-tight. In the event that anything, anything _at all_ happens to you, guardianship of your daughter, Amethyst Hope Goh, goes to K. If anyone, even GJ, try to challenge it, they would find themselves in and out of every court up to the World Court itself for most of the rest of the century."

Sherylin nodded and decided to ignore the young attorney's slip. "Thank you, Ms. Rockwaller," she said in a formal tone. "This is a load off of my mind."

Bonnie nodded. "So… uh… are you coming to K's party?" Sherylin blinked at the brunette woman oddly. "The twins fifth! I can't see Amy missing that bash, given how she and the twins have been practically joined at the hip lately!"

Sherylin _did _know about the Stoppable twins' upcoming birthday party and had already given Amy permission to attend (not that she would have been able to get away with doing anything else, thanks to the Princess's little spawn teaching Amy that damn pout). "Bonnie, uh…" she shook her head. "Isn't this a kids party?"

Bonnie waved dismissively. "Nah. K always uses the twins' parties to get the 'old crew' together – all the parents, as many of her friends and kin as can attend. The kids have their party and we have ours. It's cool! I never thought of K as much of a party animal, but between her and Ron, they can really lay it on!"

Sherylin didn't think that she classified as a 'friend' or 'kin'. Even though she was most definitely one of the 'old crew', it wasn't something that she particularly wanted to be reminded of. "Y'know, I think that everyone would be happier without me around," she said with a rueful smile.

"When was the last time you hung out with friends?" Bonnie wanted to know. The teal-eyed brunette snorted at something she saw, even though Sherylin thought that she had kept her face impassive, and smirked in triumph. "Ha! I knew it! You've been playing the recluse since you went straight! Well, you're free to do whatever you want, lady, but if you ask me, I think that you'll be happier not having to be alone. Trust me, I know this stuff."

'Alone'. Sherylin found herself wondering if Bonnie had some kind of extrasensory powers that enabled her to zero in on that word, a word that had been haunting her for some time. "I… I'm pretty sure that Kim only included me in the invitation out of courtesy…" she began.

"Bullshit," Bonnie responded flatly. "K isn't _that_ goodie-two-shoes, trust me! She wanted you there, so she invited you." Bonnie leant back, frowning dangerously, perhaps recalling some unpleasant memories of her own. "Being on the outside seems easier," the brunette attorney continued, "but it isn't. All the money, popularity or power in the world is nothing if you're _alone_."

Sherylin stood there for a long moment, gape mouthed and unable to formulate a response. "I…" she paused, swallowed and continued. "W… What the hell? It isn't as if I was _doing_ anything on Saturday…"

* * *

Sherylin Goh got out of her green Mercedes SLK coupe and looked at the Stoppable home. It was a weird, somewhat eccentric multi-level that made her wonder exactly how much input Ron Stoppable had in its design. The spread-out bottom level was completely glazed, apart from the garage block, and, from the little she could see through the heavily-tinted (and likely bullet- and impact-proof) plate glass, appeared to be essentially open plan. Dominating the right-hand side of the building and extending back from the front doors was the three-storey area that she suspected included the bedrooms and, probably, Kim and Ron's home offices (given that they were both busy and successful professionals). _Is that a roof terrace?_

Amy dodged past her mother's legs and raced up the shallow ramp to the double entrance doors. There was no doorbell button but Sherylin's ears still picked up the chimes. _Motion detector_,Sherylin decided as she locked her car's doors and reminded herself again just exactly _whose_ house this was. There_ are probably enough defences in and around the building to stop a small army!_

Much to the black-haired woman's surprise, the door did not open. Instead, Jessica Stoppable (or "Chess'ka" as Amy always called her) appeared around the far right-hand side of the building and raced over, her pretty floral-patterned sundress flapping in the slipstream of her sprint. "Amy!"

"Chess'ka!"

The two friends practically collided in a mid-air mutual glomp. By concentrating hard, Sherylin was just about able to make sense of the two kindergarteners' excited hyper-fast conversation. At that point, the front door opened and the blond-haired mini-me of Ron Stoppable appeared.

"Hi, Mrs. Goh!" Justin Stoppable said with an enthusiastic beaming smile (Sherylin had yet to explain the alternate title of 'Ms' to the boy and wasn't sure if she wanted the stress of explaining the concept of unwed motherhood to him anyway).

"Hello, Justin!" she said.

When Amy heard that name, the girl detached from Jessica and practically threw herself at the blond boy with a squeal of delight. The two grabbed each other's hands and swung each other around with a chorus of greetings and laughter, something that made Jessica smile indulgently.

"You don't have to come to the door," Jessica said. "Come on! I'll show you!"

The blond-haired, blue-eyed girl pulled the door of her house shut and set off back along the length of the Stoppable house with her brother, Sherylin and Amy in tow. They turned the corner and walked along the side of the lot before exiting into the rear garden.

The rear garden had a wooden-decked patio with a metal-framed glass railing extending a third of the way to the back of the lot. Towards the rear of the lot was a stand of trees and, in between, a grassy area with a set of swings, a small climbing frame and, of all things, a _space hopper_ with an unidentified brown-haired dusky-skinned boy bouncing on it. Up on the decking, working a barbecue grill, Shego immediately recognised Ron Stoppable in a _hideously_ loud Hawaiian shirt, short pants, sandals and an apron with the legend: '_Mama's #1 Guy_'.

"Hey! Sherylin!" Bonnie called, waving. The brunette woman's smile was a bit _too_ smug and knowing for Sherylin's taste. It seemed that Ms. Rockwaller _enjoyed_ getting her own way.

"Sherylin! You came!" Kim Stoppable, wearing tan pants (that looked nearly _sprayed _on) and an off-one-shoulder, belly-baring white-and-blue hooped top, strode over, not _exactly_ running but moving fast, and enfolded the green-skinned former villain in a tight hug. "I'm glad you came," she murmured into her former arch-foe's ear. "I've been worried about you."

Sherylin couldn't help but blush slightly at that. "Hey, I never miss a good party," she replied.

Ron came up behind his wife and squeezed her shoulder. Kim broke her hug with Sherylin and smiled up at her husband in a way that seemed to dim the bright sunlight for a moment. "Hey Shego," the tow-haired chef (and part-time inventor, from what Sherylin's sources told her) said and stuck out his hand for a shake.

Sherylin just raised an eyebrow at the man and completely restrained her urge to laugh as Kim elbowed her husband in the gut. "Oof! Hey, KP! What was that for?" Kim just raised an eyebrow. "What?"

At that point, a pink shape that Sherylin immediately recognised popped out of the pocket at the front of Ron's apron, scaled his shirt and whispered into his ear. The blond man coloured slightly in embarrassment and grinned at Sherylin in apology. "Oh yeah! Sorry, I guess I'm not as used to this stuff as Kim is! Hey there, _Sherylin_."

Sherylin smirked and took the proffered hand. "Better. You're learning, _Sidekick_," she drawled.

"Yeah, learning what?" Kim wondered, leaning back against her husband's chest in an endearingly possessive way. Sherylin didn't miss the way Ron's hands went around her waist

"Why that failing to read a lady's mind is a bad idea, right Kim?" Sherylin asked in an arch tone. Kim giggled in response.

"Man, I am _so_ going to have trouble getting used to you two liking each other," Ron groused. On his shoulder, Rufus nodded in a way that seemed to combine resignation and exasperation. "Come on, I'll pull a burger off the grill for ya."

"Burger?" Sherylin teased. "This from a five-star Michelin-rated chef?"

Kim smiled mysteriously. "What my dear husband calls a 'burger', the Michelin Guide called 'a once-in-a-lifetime experience that changes the paradigm of fast food forever'. Trust me, Sherylin. Try it. Your mouth will love you for the rest of your life."

* * *

A few minutes later, Sherylin was leaning on the railing around the edge of the decking, munching on said burger (and trying to get used to her taste buds exploding in pleasure every time she chewed). She was watching Amy, Justin, Jessica, Ronni (who she hadn't realised was actually Bonnie's daughter, having never spent much time around the girl before) and the boy, identified as 'Max' racing around, chasing each other.

"So," Bonnie said, walking over and leaning against the railing next to Sherylin. "Sherylin Goh, _alias _Shego. Once the world's most wanted woman, now teaching English Lit at Middleton Senior High and an unwed mother. What's up with that?"

Sherylin looked at the brunette attorney thoughtfully and found no malice in the younger woman's gaze. "You can't run forever," she replied at last. "Eventually, you have to learn to live like an adult. I guess I just decided I wanted a home and roots."

Bonnie nodded thoughtfully. "And the tyke?" she asked at last.

"My little Treasure," Sherylin replied, smiling in a genuinely happy way that made Bonnie's perfect, sculpted eyebrows shoot towards her hairline. "She's my reason for going on, most days. I _was _alone, and rapidly running out of reasons to go on other than survival instinct, right up until the moment I realised that I was pregnant with her."

Bonnie nodded. "Um…"

"You're wondering about her father?" Bonnie nodded. " A good guy but not husband or father material," Sherylin said. The older woman paused before shrugging thoughtfully. "Neil offered to help support Amy but I make enough to do that myself. He's seen her once when she was still a toddler but I think he was kind of relieved when I told him that I didn't expect him to marry me or have any part of her upbringing. We're friends but something tells me we would make a lousy husband and wife. Amy gets birthday presents from her 'Uncle Neil' and I bet she'll probably track him down when she's an adult but, right now, I think _everyone's_ happier with the way things are."

Bonnie nodded. "Well, at least you know the identity of your daughter's father," she sighed and shook her head. "Party, plus booze, plus knock-out drops equals Ronni." Bonnie shrugged. "Don't get me wrong, I love her to pieces and don't resent her at all but… _shit_! I felt so _stupid_ when I looked at that test! Passed in the top 5% in law school and I fell for the oldest trick in the book! Last time I went to one of my sisters' parties, I can tell you!"

Sherylin put her hand on Bonnie's shoulder. "I guess it's a good thing you've got friends," she said at last.

Bonnie looked over to where Kim was teasing Ron by holding some condiment out of his reach and showing that she was still a superb gymnast by easily dodging his lunges to try to retrieve it. "Yeah," she said. "I treated them both like crap at school but they never held a grudge. I needed a job and I needed someone to understand. They were kind of like a gift from heaven in that way."

"Yeah, that's the Princess's talent alright," Sherylin said thoughtfully, remembering how easily and completely Kim was willing to accept her own change of heart. "Who's that Max kid's folks?"

Bonnie was about to reply when the door into the interior of the house opened and two figures emerged. The first was a Latino woman, about Bonnie's height and build, with a green headband in her shoulder-length coal-black hair and amber eyes. She was accompanied by a tall, thin and blue-eyed man with mousy brown hair, leaning heavily on a cane. Kim tossed the pot of whatever she had been keeping away from Ron over to him, who caught it with barely a glance. She then walked over to the newcomers. "All okay?"

The woman smiled. "Yeah, it wasn't such a big deal after all. The idiots had re-booted the server and not bothered to run the service set-ups."

Kim nodded and turned to Sherylin. "Sherylin Goh, may I introduce Felix and Zita Renton. They're Max's dad and mom."

Shego walked over to shake Felix's hand and, a well-travelled and cosmopolitan woman to the core, completely expected the Latino kiss on both cheeks from Zita. She stepped back and thought for a moment. _I know that name_, she realised. She suddenly snapped her fingers. "I know! Ed Lipsky told me about you! Er… aren't you supposed to be…?" she pointed helplessly at Felix's legs.

The tall man shrugged. "Robo-tronic exo-frames," he explained, tapping his shins with his cane. "I'm not about to run any marathons but…" Felix frowned. "Wait a minute… _Sherylin Goh_…?" There was a hint of fear in the man's eyes and he looked at Kim urgently.

"Yeah, that's right, remember that couple of weeks she was our substitute math teacher back in senior year?" Ron said loudly, coming over to join them. "She came back to Middleton about six months after the Lowardian sitch and decided to settle here. She's cool, Felix." Kim and Sherylin both shot Ron looks of gratitude.

Felix looked at Ron thoughtfully. "Well, if you say so, man," he said at last. He shook his head. "So… You want to try out that new accelerator card I've put in your house network?"

"_Do_ I…?"

"AHEM!" Both men looked at Kim, who was wearing a look of mixed exasperation and affection. "Maybe that could wait until after the main event?"

Felix blushed. Ron just grinned engagingly. "Plenty o' hours in the day, KP," he replied.

* * *

"_Happy birthday, to you! Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday Justin and Jessica…! Happy birthday to… yooouuu!_ The children and adults (including the recently-arrived Possible and Stoppable grandparents) finished the chorus in passable harmony and applauded the principals of the party. Justin grinned around proudly, while Jessica blushed and seemed almost ready to disappear behind her long blonde hair, which had somehow worked its way across her eyes.

"Yay! Blow out the candles! Make a wish!" The twins hardly needed Max's encouragement. They sucked in _huge_ breaths and blew out the five candles on the cake in a single 'whoosh'.

"Great! What did you wish for?" Ronni yelled out.

Jessica shot her god-sister an odd look but Justin was about to answer. At that moment, Amy's hand slapped over the blond boy's mouth. "Silly!" she snapped. "It won't come true if you tell!" Justin frowned and then his eyes went wide with realisation. Amy removed her hand and acknowledged Justin's thanks with a cool, mocking smile that Sherylin was sure she had seen in the mirror on occasion.

Kim brandished a knife in a worryingly expert manner and quickly sliced up the cake, giving a slice to each of the children before serving the adults.

Sherylin watched the children start ravenously on the cake and then watched something very odd happen. Justin and Amy exchanged some words that she missed and the two kids stared at their cakes suspiciously before suddenly offering their slice to the other. They fed each other simultaneously, their elbows linked and nodded in satisfaction. Clearly having satisfied their curiosity, they drifted off to the other children.

Kim nearly dropped her plate and made a panicked squeak. "Does… does Amy know…?"

"The symbolism of that?" Sherylin responded, feeling a bit faint. "No! She can't! How _could_ she?"

* * *

"Okay, present time," Kim announced.

"YEAH!" Ron called out pumping a fist in the air. He looked around and grinned at his houseguests. "What? I might be twenty-eight years old, but that doesn't stop me enjoying stuff like this! The only thing I like more is when _I_ get the presents!"

Kim grinned at her husband in a sensual way. "Yeah, and I know that Monkey-boy _likes_ unwrapping _his _presents!" The two Stoppables grinned at each other, seeming to forget they had company for a moment before Kim's mother cleared her throat significantly. Kim blushed and turned away from her husband. However, Sherylin caught Ron's hand reach out and pat his wife's shapely backside, making the redhead squeak and blush a bit brighter. Fortunately, either the kids missed it or they were used to their parents being 'physical' with each other.

"Okay, first up, we've got something from Uncle Wade and Auntie Joss," Kim announced, picking up two boxes. "They say 'sorry' for not being here today but with Auntie Joss's baby only a month or so away, they couldn't travel all the way from Montana."

Kim handed the boxes over to the twins. Justin tore into his, whilst Jessica was more careful in finding the folds and joins and unwrapping the present so that the wrapping paper remained in one piece. Both opened the boxes inside and lifted electronic devices from the padded interiors.

"Woah! Cool!" was Max's opinion. "Your first cells!"

"Not quite, Max," Kim replied with a bittersweet smile.

"Mommy!" Jessica gasped. "Are they…?"

"Your first Kimmunicators," Kim replied with a nod. She knelt down in between her children and showed them the flip-top multi-function devices and showed the twins how to operate them, paying special attention to the GPS distress beacon.

"Me next! Me next!" Amy called out excitedly. She rushed over to the pile of presents and fish out the box she had brought. She handed it over to Justin and Jessica. "This is from my Mama and me," she said shyly.

The twins looked at each other and co-operated in opening the box. They looked inside and grinned. "A GI-Jack! Cool!" Justin said with a broad grin.

"Ooh! A Malibu Stacey! The new Action-Girl version! Hey, Mommy! If she had red hair, she'd be you!" The blonde girl shoved the boxed fashion doll at her mother to emphasise the point. She then turned and enfolded Amy in a hug. "Thank you, Amy!"

"You're welcome Chess'ka," Amy murmured with a blush.

Justin bounced over next. "Yeah! Thank you, Amy!" he said. He took the girl's hands and the two blushed at each other. Finally, the brown-haired, violet-eyed girl leaned over and dropped a kiss on the surprised boy's cheek. "Yuck! Cooties!" he cried out in panic.

"Justin Stop'ble! I'll have you know I _haven't_ got Cooties!" Amy snapped in reply, her fists dropping onto her hips in a combative way.

"Really?" Justin replied ingeniously. "Oh, that's okay then!" The five children were all clearly mystified by the way the adults all dissolved into laughter.

Whilst the twins were receiving their grandparents' gifts, Sherylin found her eyes drawn to the 'Kimmunicators' (blue for Justin, clipped to the belt of his denim shorts, pink for Jessica, strapped to her left forearm). "I guess you are planning for them to follow in the family business?" she asked Kim.

Kim sighed. "I hope not," she said at last. Ron walked over and wrapped his arms around his wife, who laid her arms along his and looked at her children in worry. "I'm no fool, Sherylin. I have enemies; Ron too. There are people out there who wouldn't have a moment's compunction in using them to hurt us. That's why they've had GPS/biometric tracer chips in them from the moment they were born. We'll train them to defend themselves too. That's one thing about our lives. You _can't_ walk away."

Ron leaned over and kissed Kim on the cheek. "Don't worry, KP," he murmured. "I won't let anything happen to them or to you." Kim looked up at him with an appreciative, loving smile, her eyes slightly misty.

Feeling a bit of an intruder in such an intimate moment, Sherylin looked back over to where Amy, Jessica and Ronni were discussing the finer points of Malibu Stacey fashion. Sherylin frowned, squinted and shook her head. _What the hell…?_ For a moment, she could have been _sure_ that Amy had a purple Kimmunicator strapped to her left forearm! _My eyes are playing tricks on me! Too much lost sleep, I guess._

* * *

"Yeah! Take out that berserker orc, Felix!"

"I got it, Zita! You just keep the bodkin archers back!"

"Ha! Feel the wrath of Ron-man!"

"Hnuck! Tunnel-lord rules!"

Sherylin shook her head at the sight of three grown adults and a _naked mole rat_ tearing their way through the latest version of the MMORPG, _Era of Everlot, 'Wrath of the Ice Lord'_. "Has he really grown up?" she asked Kim out of the corner of her mouth.

Kim smiled lovingly. "Ron is the most loving, devoted husband you could hope to have," she replied. "He lives for me and the kids. Sometimes I worry that he will work himself into a breakdown because he is so determined that we won't want for anything. Yeah, he has a big kid inside him, but that's part of the overall package! Besides, without the big kid, he wouldn't have as good an imagination and without that…!" Kim blushed and fell silent.

"Without the imagination, he wouldn't keep you guessing, huh Kim?" Sherylin couldn't help but grin evilly at Kim's blush. "Good for you, Princess," she said with a smirk. "An _interesting_ relationship is a happy relationship."

Kim decided to change the subject, before the arousal brought on by just _thinking_ about the products Ron's… er… 'adult imagination' became too obvious. "Let's check on the kids," she whispered.

It was late evening and, exhausted from a day of play and decidedly unhealthy food, the children had been put to bed whilst the adults continued their own party. The Possibles and Stoppables had both left the party a short while ago. Sherylin was a little humbled by the way both sets of grandparents had accepted her. Okay, the Stoppables hardly knew her… _before_ (although Ron's adoptive sister, Hana, had looked at her suspiciously more than once). The Possibles, however, knew her _very_ well. She had expected a lot more awkwardness. However, once Kim had introduced her, both had been welcoming and friendly and had made a point of including her.

The two women ascended to the second floor, where the kids' bedrooms were. Much to their surprise, Max and Justin were missing from Justin's room. With a slight frown, Kim checked Jessica's bedroom and then sighed affectionately. Sherylin couldn't help but grin at the sight within. The five kindergarteners were all on Jessica's bed, tangled together in a great human knot and fast asleep. "Now that," Sherylin stated, "is illegally cute."

Kim giggled in reply. The young woman walked over to the bed and stroked her daughter's hair slightly and caressed her son's face. "They grow too fast," she said at last, before turning to leave.

* * *

"Sherylin, thank you," Kim said with a broad smile. "Thank you for letting Amy come and thank you for coming yourself."

Sherylin smiled warmly at the woman who, at last, she was willing to categorise as a 'friend'. The only thing that stopped them embracing was the snoozing form of Amy in her arms. "It was my pleasure, Kim," she said. "We'll have to do it again, some time."

Kim nodded. Ron suddenly spoke up. "When's Amy's birthday?"

* * *

After putting Amy into bed, Sherylin retreated back downstairs to the den. It was a sign of how exhausted by the day that Amy was that the girl had not even stirred during the drive back and being changed into her sleepwear.

Now, Sherylin stared at the telephone in front of her as if it were an enemy.

Seeing Kim and Ron's family and friends brought crashing home to Sherylin the lacks in Amy's life… in _her_ life. Watching Justin and Jessica showing off their presents to the Possibles and Stoppables had made it clear to Sherylin how important family was. No matter how much a pain they were (and Kim's reaction to her twin younger brothers proved that they _were_ a pain), they were still family and that should cover over a multitude of sins.

Furthermore, as Kim had put it: '_That's one thing about our lives. You _can't _walk away_'.

Finally, Sherylin came to a decision. She picked up the receiver and dialled a number from memory.

"_Team Go Tower,_" came a familiar voice. Sherylin's voice locked up and she couldn't speak. "_Hello? Is there anyone there?_"

"Henry! It's Sherylin!"

There was a long pause, long enough that she wondered if Hego had hung up.

"_Sh… Sherylin? Sherylin! It's you! You're _alive_!_"

The green-skinned woman couldn't help but grin at the joy in her goofy-but-honest eldest brother's voice as he shouted over his shoulder for Mego and the Wegos. "Hey, big brother! I'm thinking that you weren't expecting this call."

"_Expecting? Sherylin, you know perfectly well that you darn well dropped off the face of the Earth for a _decade_! I thought that you were _dead_! Wh… Where are you? Are you in trouble? We can be there right away!_"

_Oh God, he's crying! _Sherylin realised. She had always known that Hego was scrupulous and honourable in keeping his responsibilities towards his family after their father's death and their mother's disappearance. However, he had always seemed so _distant_, so focussed on the 'mission' at the expense of all else that, some days, she had wondered if he really _cared_ for his kin. Now, she knew.

"Henry, you know that… that I had a lot of bad things in my life that I had to sort out. I had to grow up and settle down some time and, now that's happened, I…" Sherylin broke off and then continued. "Henry, the last few years, so much has changed for me. I couldn't pretend that I didn't have a family anymore. It would be selfish and it would hurt more than just you and me."

"_I'm glad you've called_," Hego replied. "_Geez, Sherri… You've missed so much! You haven't even met Glory and Michelle!"_

_Who the hell are they?_ Sherylin wondered. She next spoke words that she never thought to say to Hego but now knew were _right_. "Henry, in seven weeks time… a… a _very special_ little girl is turning five years old. Henry… it's time that she met her uncles… I _want _her to meet them … she _needs_ to meet them. I don't want us to be alone anymore. I want a family."


	9. Avatar: The Legend of Kim

**Sitches Aplenty**

A Repository of KP Shorts

**Disclaimer**

Kim Possible and the characters and situations of the Kim Possible universe were created by Mark McCorkle and Bob Schooley for the Disney Channel and are the copyright of the Walt Disney Corporation. This is a non-profit fan work for free distribution through the world-wide web. No breach of trademark or copyright is intended.

**Author's Notes**

This is going to be a series of short stories where I take Kim Possible, her friends and her enemies places dictated by my own imagination. These short stories are not part of any larger continuity and will only be linked if I specifically say so in my introductory notes.

Censor: T – Just for safety's sake

Okay, something new this time.

One thing that I know annoys some KP fans about the fourth season was the focus on Ron's development. For some of them, Ron's final act of saving Kim from Warhok and Warmonga devalued the character of Kim and made her just another damsel in distress for a superhero to save.

I'm not sure that I agree with those complaints. However, I _do_ agree that one needs to tread carefully not to turn Kim into an irrelevance or a plucky, beautiful sidekick to the Ultimate Monkey Master, which happens in some fanfictions, sometimes quite deliberately. So, I thought, what if we tilt the balance back the other way? What if we give Kim her own power upgrade? Then I saw a picture on DeviantArt of Kim in the costume worn by Katara in the early part of the last season of _Avatar – The Last Airbender_, and this triggered something in my head. In truth, it had been rattling around in my brain since I read Robert Teague's most recent story, which was a fusion of _Kim Possible_ with _W.I.T.C.H.s_.

Why _not_ have Kim as a magical girl and an equal to Ron at his MMP-boosted most powerful? Why not make her _even stronger still_? Why should Ron be the only one who can go über in a pinch? From these thoughts came this story.

For the record, Monique designed the costumes Kim and all the Order wear. They look somewhat like Toph's default costume in _Avatar_ with the exception of tabard-like extensions from the top jerkin to hang between the legs, front and rear. Kim and Monique's are sea blue and white, Bonnie's is red and yellow, Joss's is green and beige and Tara's is orange and cream. Yori and Ron still use their Yamanouchi-standard ninja _gi_. They all have individual adaptations to their costumes to reflect their individual personalities, like jewellery, weapons and decorations. Kim's costume doesn't have boots because it is easier to sense stuff without boot leather in the way.

**8. Avatar – The Legend of Kim**

Kim Possible had always considered herself, ultimately, to be just an ordinary, average small-town girl. If she became a global hero, it was because of her sense of responsibility to people and the community of humankind in general. If she put her life on the line time and time again to protect perfect strangers, it was because she genuinely believed it to be the right thing to do.

Oh, she was far from perfect. She candidly admitted that she could be arrogant, self-absorbed and somewhat vain. However, she remained pretty firmly grounded most times. She did _not_ want to be a global media star, a sex-symbol or some kind of bizarre public property.

She sure as _heck_ didn't want to be a living goddess.

What a pity that no one had asked her what she might or might not want with her life. Somewhere, Kim decided morosely, the Powers That Be were laughing their butts off at her.

* * *

Kim Possible stood alone in the middle of the Nevada desert in her pseudo-oriental fighting _gi_, her legs slightly spread, her bare feet against the rocky soil and her fists clenched at her side as she watched several dozen tons of steel bearing down on her. Motor Ed had been at it _again_; stealing cars, bikes, trucks, bits of jet planes and helicopters to build a huge number of armoured, chopped vehicular monstrosities with which he was tearing up this part of Nevada seemingly for no other reason that a lust for chaos.

"_You'd better get out of the way, Red or you'll be road-kill! Seriously!_" the engineering prodigy with the blond-mullet announced over his turbine-powered monster truck's loudspeakers.

Kim shook her head in a kind of mournful disbelief. One day, the villains would get smart enough to realise that _this didn't work_ with her. She really had no reason to fear an oncoming mass of steel, even one with spikes on the front and spinning razor-sharp scythes on the wheel hubs. Not anymore.

Kim suddenly stamped her right foot and the rocky ground split open in a dozen places, spires of rock bursting out. Several of the monster trucks and heavily souped-up cars were upended by hits below their side panels. In response to Kim shifting her feet, the spires toppled down on the vehicles like stony hammers and crushed them, several of their operators barely getting out of the way in time. Those machines that hit the spires head-on smashed through them without slowing down. This included Ed's own monster truck, which had almost reached Kim.

The redheaded woman called to the Air and suddenly was soaring through the sky on an invisible whirlwind, leaping over the oncoming truck and landing in the middle of the mass of overturned and crushed vehicles. Those of Ed's lackeys that were still standing drew weapons ranging from guns through bicycle chains to baseball bats and advanced on Kim. Immediately, she widened the diameter of the whirlwind. Visibility dropped to zero but that didn't matter. Kim could _feel_ Ed's mooks through the Earth as they suddenly halted, desperately trying to protect their faces and eyes from the sandblasting-level sand-storm. Guided by their fear-filled heartbeats, Kim lunged forwards, using her martial arts skills to the full to knock the wannabe-biker mooks flying to the ground and then restraining them with rocky body-cuffs.

Several smaller vehicles, mostly chopped bikes, entered the localised sand-storm in an attempt to get to Kim. Kim sent large stones flying towards them like rocky baton rounds, knocking their riders off of their mounts. The last one, a horribly-customised Jeep Cherokee, kept coming, despite its shattered windshield. Kim simply dodged to one side and slammed her hand against the ground, making a spire of rock rip upwards through the bottom of the off-roader. Its driver got clear just before its gas tank exploded, only to suddenly be sucked down as the ground beneath him suddenly morphed into quick-sand and solidified again as soon as he had sunk down to his neck.

One of the lackeys had the foresight to put on aviator's goggles and cover his nose and mouth with a filter mask. "Okay you freak bitch!" he shouted. "You're goin' _down_!" He levelled a pump-action shotgun at her.

Even though Kim hadn't got up from dodging the jeep yet, she figured that she could probably dodge the shot. She just didn't feel the need to. Instead, she called to the Water in the radiator of the wrecked monster truck behind her. It exploded out of its container, spontaneously freezing into icy daggers that flashed across the gap and nailed the mook's leather jacket and pants to the side of another wrecked vehicle. She then focussed the whirlwind into a single enormous concussive blow to the gut that sent him into dream-land.

With the whirlwind gone, Ed felt confident enough to lead another charge with his surviving heavy machines. Kim smirked and called to the Fire burning in the jeep's wreckage, pumping energy into it to make it more intense and far larger. She then swept the flames out towards the oncoming hulks of steel in a blazing scythe of fire at about ankle height. The intense flames reduced the rubber of the oncoming cars' and monster trucks' tyres to slag, making some of them swerve and crash into each other. Others overturned or skidded to a halt. Kim focussed on the Air and flipped those that could still move on their rims onto their backs.

Even in the desert, there was water, although deep below the surface. There was life too and, now Kim had the chance to concentrate, she was able to use both Water and the Spirit of life itself to suddenly vivify innumerable seeds. Suddenly the desert exploded open with vines and creepers that wrapped around the overturned vehicles and their desperate operators, ensnaring them.

"_DAMN YOOOUUU!_" Ed jumped from his disabled monster truck a sawn-off shotgun levelled at his adversary, his fingers squeezing the double trigger…

Kim simply called to the Earth again and a barrier rose up and took both packets of buckshot. Kim then dropped the barrier and focussed her _ki_ that more deeply. With a strangely balletic move, she twirled her hands around each other and then pointed her right fore and index fingers at Ed's truck. A jagged bolt of blue-white lightning crackled from her fingers and slammed into the disabled vehicle. The vehicle exploded in with a titanic concussion, sending Ed tumbling across the ground, his gun clattering away.

The mulleted hell-raiser was scrabbling across the ground towards it when the Air suddenly tightened around him and yanked him from the ground. He found himself hovering in front of a seriously pissed-off Kim Possible. He grinned in a sickly way as he looked into those flashing, furious green eyes. "Uh… uh… H… Hiya, Red! How's it hangin'?"

Kim glared at Ed in a way that reminded the man that this was a woman who routinely took on _armies_ single-handed and _won_. "Ed, what have I told you about stealing cars and other stuff an' then raising hell with them?"

"Um… That I shouldn't do it?"

"Then why are we having this conversation?"

"I was getting _bored_!" Ed protested. "I mean, most of the stuff guys bring to me at the garage are so… _ordinary_!"

"The way of the world, Ed," Kim said. "If you don't like doing ordinary stuff, you should start a custom shop, like Ron suggested!" The blond muttered something. "What was that? A little louder, please and thank you?"

"Didn't want to do it legit," Ed muttered like a child who had been caught stealing cookies. "It's more fun this way!"

Kim quirked an eyebrow and looked around at the devastation around her before looking back to Motor Ed, still trapped mid-air by her Air-bending. "Still having fun?"

Ed grimaced. "Seriously, Red, I didn't mean no harm!"

"I wonder if you really mean that and are delusional or if you're lying actually think that I'm stupid enough to believe you?" Kim shook her head. "You know what? Forget it. I'm through playing with you, Ed. I've gone easy on you because I owe your cousin Drew a few favours but I've finally _had enough_!"

Ed went white. "Don't kill me Red! _Seriously_! _I'll be good_!" he squealed.

Kim walked over to one of the other overturned monster trucks, having the Air carry Ed alongside her. "I'm going to do worse than kill you Ed." She touched the truck and the metal bodywork suddenly began to morph and reshape itself in line with her will. It turned into metallic tentacles that wrapped tightly around Ed and bound him to the side of the wreckage. "I'm going to leave you here for Global Justice. They'll take you to The Anvil and _there's no auto shop in that jail_!"

Kim called to the Air and soared into the sky as Ed's scream of denial echoed across the desert.

* * *

No, Kim had not wanted to be a goddess. Luck, genetics or powers of a kind she didn't fully understand even now had other plans.

It was a week after the Lowardian attack that the Powers started appearing in all sorts of people. Poor Bonnie had run through the ruined streets of Middleton, screaming like a lost soul, stark naked and ablaze from head to toe but _not being touched by the fire at all_. Tara, who had always been a bit ethereal and wraith-like, woke up one morning to find she was _hovering_ _above_ her bed! The Tweebs suddenly found that they could actually reshape metal and stone with a touch. Monique had been walking down the street when a window cleaner on a ledge above her overturned his bucket; the water stopped dead a good twelve inches above her head and the gone _sideways_!

At first, Kim thought that the Lowardians had dropped some kind of virus into the atmosphere that had caused mutations in its victims. However, the real truth could not be stranger.

A few days later, Kim herself was washing in a communal shower at the refugee camp where the Possibles were living until they had rebuilt enough of their house to live in. Her shampoo was too far away for her to grab it. The water cascading down on her turned into a flowing, liquid tentacle _and picked it up for her_. She was actually too afraid to scream. Even so, she was still kneeling where she had fallen, staring at her shampoo bottle in her hands, when the mechanical timer shut off the shower. In fact, she wasn't sure how long she had been there when she had heard the voice.

* * *

"_Hail, Avatar!_"

Kim was still on her knees, where she had fallen after taking the shampoo bottle and realising _what_ had given it to her. She turned her head towards the kindly and somewhat humour-filled voice and saw probably the second or third weirdest thing she had ever seen. At first, she thought it was Master Sensei, in his spirit projection form. However, it was not. It was a bearded, bald old man with tattoos shaped like arrows on his head and arms, in the clothes of a Buddhist priest, glowing like a blue hologram. Kim was too freaked out by what had just happened to react to an old man being with her whilst she was naked in the shower. "Who are you?"

"_My name is Aang, Kimberly, daughter of Anne, daughter of Mary, Water-bender and distant blood of the Northern Water Tribe_. _Once… more than three thousand years ago, I was the Avatar, the one blessed by the Spirits, or cursed, depending on your point of view, to control the powers of all the Elements to protect the peace and harmony of our world._"

"Y… You're over three-thousand years old?"

"_Oh no! I'm quite dead!_" Aang replied jocularly. "_What you see is an echo, if you will. An imprint of all I was and all that I knew that endures in the Avatar Spirit. It is the destiny of each and every Avatar to leave a part of them behind to help train those who are to follow them_."

Kim nodded. She actually _got_ that, which was probably indicative of the general weirdness coefficient of her life. "So… why are you here?"

"_The Avatar is the guardian and protector of the harmony of the Elements. Surely you are aware that, in the past few days, that harmony has been sent tottering as never before!_"

"Elements…?"

Aang nodded. "_You must have noticed that people have suddenly gained the ability of directing the four elements? Of Earth, Air, Fire and Water?_"

Kim looked down at her shampoo bottle and swallowed. "Do you know what's happening? Wade says it's been happening to people all over the world!"

"_For millennia the Elements have been quiescent, Kimberley. They were no longer needed by mankind because of our greater and greater technology and reliance on machines and the things we make. However, with the disaster of the past few days, they have awoken once again!_"

"All the weird stuff that has started is due to the Lowardian attack?"

"_Indirectly. With the limits of technology exposed, people are ready to accept the old powers again and make use of them to defend their homes against the alien menace._" Aang walked over and sat on a bucket next to Kim's stall. What surprised Kim was that she could partially see the bucket _through him_! No more doubt that he was a ghost! "_Kimberley, these powers, as you call them, are not something alien suddenly imposed upon our race. They are something that was within you anyway. They were simply… _sleeping_. Now they have awoken again and the time has come for mankind to once again learn their ways._"

"People need to control them or there'll be trouble!" The spirit of Aang nodded in agreement. "You've come to help train people?"

"_No, it is only the Avatar who can do that, Kimberley. It is the Avatar who is the guardian of and forger of harmony between the Elements. I can only advise and even then only in the most limited ways_."

"So, we need to find the current Avatar then. Do you have any idea who he or she might be?" The spirit of Aang looked into her eyes and Kim felt her heart lurch in her chest. "Aang?"

The ghost's expression seemed almost apologetic. "_There is one in every generation blessed by the Elements to be their guardian and champion. A hero. A peace-maker. A symbol of hope and harmony. One to whom all can look for justice and protection. The Avatar._" Kim shook her head spastically in instinctive denial. "_For thousands of years the Avatar Spirit was quiescent, content to allow itself to fade into history, myth and then into oblivion. That time has now passed. A new Avatar has been chosen. Hail, Avatar Kimberley, two-hundred and fifty-fifth reincarnation of The Avatar of recorded history_."

Kim's mind was refusing to process what she had just been told, she turned so she could slump back against the rear wall of the shower stall, her arms and legs limp. "_Um… Kimberley?_" Was it her or was the ghost _blushing_? "_My dear, I am naught but a spirit and very much beyond these things; Even if I were not, Katara remains quite enough for me. However, I do think that you should find something to wear. Whilst you are an attractive young woman, I doubt that you wish to be seen naked by anyone entering this room_." Kim squeaked and lunged for her bath-towel.

* * *

Kim couldn't believe it. She _didn't want_ to believe it! She was just… _Kim_! She was willing to accept the sudden hydrokinetic powers but not that she was some kind of… _living goddess_ with power over all the old Philosophical elements! She wasn't willing to accept the sudden load of being solely responsible for the peace and metaphysical harmony of _the entire world_!

It was a stressful few months. After an initial panic over the emergence of the Powers, the world had settled down somewhat. Global Justice estimated that about one in six people had suddenly developed various elemental powers. Power of fire, earth, air and water had emerged in relatively equal proportions across the planet. These varied in strength from simply being able to cause small movements with a great deal of concentration to being able to generate enormous effects that could cause widespread damage (or prevent it).

Two things very quickly became apparent. Firstly, _some one_ had to take charge and help people to come to terms with their new powers. The number of deaths from sudden uncontrolled power outbursts was rising constantly; Then there were those who used their powers for crime. Secondly, Kim was very obviously almost the only one who could see Aang, his successor, Korra, and, occasionally, his predecessors, Roku and Kyoshi, who seemed to be the only ones who knew anything about these powers and their apparent origin. Kim being almost the only one able to see and hear them led to many cringe-worthy moments where she would get into arguments with the Avatar or Avatars appearing to her, making her parents fearful that she was going insane.

Only Ron believed her unquestioningly. It turned out that he could see the spirits too, although no one else apparently could. This fascinated the spirits of the former Avatars (hundreds of which had made brief appearances but only Aang, Korra, Kyoshi and Roku making repeated, sustained appearances). They concluded that Ron was something that had never been seen before, something called a 'Spirit-bender', someone naturally sensitive to the flow of energy, especially psychic and parapsychic energies. When, during a conference of sorts held on the flanks of Mount Middleton, Ron demonstrated the Mystical Monkey Power, this apparently sealed the deal. The spirit of Kyoshi, who tended to be somewhat over-dramatic, bound Ron with a blood-curdling oath to protect the Avatar at all costs and train her in the use of his Element.

"_She must be ready when the Invaders return_," the spirit of the tall warrior-woman concluded.

Kim's heart turned to ice in her chest when she heard that declaration. "Th… The Lowardians are coming back?"

"_My dear child_," Roku said with a sad smile, "_it is in the nature of conquerors to try and try again. They believe they are _destined_ to rule. Our world lies in their way. It must be subjugated… or destroyed!_"

Kim sprang to her feet. "We can't let that happen! We've got to stop them somehow!"

"_Only by learning to guide their elements can the people of this world have the power to hold them back,_" Kyoshi said, staring resolutely at the redheaded girl. "_However, they will continue to return time and again and each time they will slay more and destroy more. If you wish to finally defeat them? To finally drive them off forever? To restore peace to this world…?_"

Korra stepped forward. "_Only the Avatar herself, in harmony with all the Elements, can achieve such a feat_. _Only she can do this, Kim. Only _you_. There is no-one else._"

There was a long pause. Kim looked at Ron, over at her battered hometown and then back to the sparkling blue echoes of Avatars past, trying to swallow around a suddenly dry throat. She sat down, _hard_ on the grassy slope of Mount Middleton and began to tremble and cry. More than anything she wanted to _wake up_ with her Mom telling her that she had a bad dream. Ron settled beside her and wrapped her in her arms. After a long moment, Kim looked up and kissed him in thanks and snuggled into his reassuring warmth. Then she pushed him away slightly, stood up and turned to the four spirits, her expression bleak but her eyes filled with determination. "Tell me what I have to do," she said at last.

* * *

So began the strangest period of Kim's life. A _quest_, in the old-fashioned sense; like something out of Tolkein or Lewis! Her, Ron, Bonnie, Tara and Monique were off across the entire length and breadth of the Earth, to learn about their powers and learn to control them from various gurus, masters and even from ordinary people who had embraced their gifts and were making an effort to control them. Eventually Joss, who had developed the ability to shape rock and metal, joined them, as did Yori, who informed them that her place was to defend the Ultimate Monkey Master and the Avatar. For all the young Japanese woman lacked any powers, she was easily the best fighter of the group.

There were problems; Oh, there were problems. Shego, to no-one's surprise, had become a Fire-bender and whatever progress towards giving up villainy she had made were lost with the extra power boost. With Andrea Lynn and a small band of others at her side, both Benders and non-Benders, she tried to seize power (or at least wealth) for herself. She had always been Kim's arch-foe. Now she had gone far beyond that to become her _anti-self_; a perverted sort of reflection that haunted Kim with every step she took and was determined to destroy her to prove herself the most powerful one of all.

The learning experience itself was difficult, bordering on the horrible, especially when it fell to Aang and Master Sensei to teach Kim to harness the power and wisdom of the ancient Spirits.

It required more mental discipline than Kim had ever known before to even _access _the Spirit Plane, let alone to do so _safely_. Some of those things were more _alien _and more _evil _than she previously could imagine. Yet, she had to be the bridge and arbiter between them and the human world. Somehow, she had to learn how to discipline her mind and soul on a level that she had never known before. She had worried that, in doing so, she would lose an essential part of herself as she became more and more 'Avatar Kim' and less and less 'Kim Possible'. However, with her friends at her side, especially Ron, Monique and, surprisingly, Bonnie, she remained in touch with her humanity.

* * *

Returning to a mostly-rebuilt Middleton at the end of her quest was amazingly hard. Not because it was any less _home_ but because things had been going badly for her family. Of all the things Kim had experienced, of all the ways that her perceptions and awareness had widened and of all the horrors she could imagine, nothing prepared her for her _father_ to turn out to be a _bigot_. A man unwilling to tolerate _anything_ that lay beyond his comprehension and control.

The seeds had been oh-so-innocuous and Kim never quite escaped the feeling that it might have ultimately been all _her_ fault. Kim's 'native' element, the ability that, Avatar or no, would have been in her blood was her hydrokinetic powers, Water-bending to use the appropriate term. If Kim had this power, might her mother not possess it too? Aang conceded that it was likely – mothers and daughters historically had the same powers as did fathers and sons. So, on whatever opportunity she got, she encouraged and taught her mother to develop this talent.

Anne was fascinated, and not just with the ability to shape water in line with her will. Through Kim, Korra had explained to her mother that the most frequent application of water-bending was in healing. As the anti-type of Fire, the element of destruction, Water could be used to focus the power of the Spirits into the sick and injured, encouraging accelerated healing of even normally-untreatable injuries.

Her father was _not_ happy. From the first time that Kim's mother even _mentioned_ the possibility that she might have such meta-human powers, he had been very firmly opposed to her utilising them. Anne initially thought that, maybe, he was just worried about the potential for harm that came from undisciplined use of Elemental abilities. Rather than cause an argument, she focussed on gaining the needed discipline in secret. However, when she later demonstrated her control of her powers by using water in the wash-basin to lift his coffee mug over to him, he exploded in fury. He _demanded_ that his wife instantly and forever cease using these _freakish_ abilities. He didn't care that Anne was very obviously fully in control of her powers. He didn't care about the potential for healing. All he cared about was that they were _unnatural _skills; _Demonic_ things that should be resisted and rejected.

When Anne, in a voice that could freeze hydrogen solid, had asked her husband if he regarded his Earth-bender sons and his daughter, the Avatar, as unnatural, 'demonic' freaks, he hadglared at her. "_If they continue to use these… these… 'skills', then they're no children of mine! It would have been better for this world if we'd _aborted_ them!_"

Anne had been horrified that it took her nearly a minute to regain control of her voice and demand that Jim get out of her house. _Now_. Her husband had sneered and reminded her that it was _his_ house. Would she renounce these freak powers? When she firmly shook her head and responded that she could not reject something with such potential for good, he had ordered her out. When she refused, he had struck her and, whilst her head was still spinning from the blow, had physically thrown her out onto the street without anything more than the clothes on her back.

Later that day, Anne received a 'phone call from Tim and Jim that the lock on the house's front door had been changed. When she drove over from the Medical Centre, she found all of her, the boys and Kim's belongings, neatly boxed, in the drive.

Kim vividly remembered her astonishment when she arrived back in Middleton to be informed by a stony-faced Vivian Porter, standing at the front door of what she still thought of as _her_ home, informing her that she was not welcome there.

She had finally caught up with the rest of her family at, of all places, Dr. Drakken's new lair, on the slopes of Mt. Middleton. It took her mother, the former super-villain and Ron's combined pleas to convince her not to go charging over to the Space Centre to confront her father. However, after a few hours' mediation, she realised that nothing was to be gained from confrontation. Her father had made his choice and that was the end of the matter. It was necessary for them all to move forwards from that point rather than indulge in endless recriminations that could change nothing.

Living at Dr. D's lair was probably the single awkweird experience of Kim's life. Most of the time, the Tweebs were helping him perfect world-conquering technology that make her head spin. Her Mom was helping keep the lab tidy and had taken over managing Dr. D.'s HenchMen. It didn't help that the blue-skinned doofus was very obviously falling for her Mom. It helped even less that it was very clearly mutual. Hearing her Mom call Dr. D. 'Drew' made Kim's brain rattle in its pan.

Anne was more determined than ever to learn how to Water-bend and use its amazing healing powers on her patients. She and Kim had been going to a geothermally-heated pool outside the lair to practice. One day, as she and her Mom were getting to the most advanced forms, Kim sensed something through the Air. Drakken was standing, hidden by some of the plants that he had caused to grow around his lair as camouflage and was watching the two Poss… No, Anne wasn't waiting for the formal divorce and was already using her maiden name of 'Credible' again… He was watching them perform the nearly-hypnotic ritual motions of Water-bending which somewhat resembled traditional Indian dancing. More specifically, his eyes were locked onto Anne's bikini-clad body as curving, sparkling tendrils of water flowed around her in response to her motions and will. Through the Air, Kim easily heard him whisper: "_A goddess! So beautiful…!_"

With a smirk, Kim called on the Fire and gave the hidden former mad scientist a hot foot. As he hopped on his good foot in plain view of the two redheaded women, Kim had climbed out of the pool and suggested to her mom that she and 'Drew' obviously had something to discuss. That evening, Anne moved her stuff into Dr. D.'s quarters and Kim spent the night crying in Ron's arms at the final and irrevocable death of her childhood and family.

* * *

The final confrontation with Kim's father… at least the last in Middleton… could not have been more painful. Dr. D's long-held mistrust of James Possible had only been heightened by his treatment of his family. He had kept the Space Centre bugged (ironically enough with bugs that he had built with the Tweebs' help). It was thus that he found out about his old College rival's intention to build a device that would permanently disrupt and dissipate Elemental powers, thus returning everyone to 'normal' and saving humanity from being overrun by 'freaks'. As Aang pointed out, doing so would also disrupt the natural balance and render Earth uninhabitable. Of course, as the Tweebs pointed out, that was assuming that the device would work as advertised and not just simply kill every living thing on Earth.

So it was that Kim and her travelling companions (long since named "Kim's Angels" by the media) went to the Space Centre to confront her father. His security precautions were every bit as good as his reputation as an engineer would suggest. However, it wasn't enough to stop Kim, Bonnie, Monique, Tara and Joss, who were now all master-Benders. Ron and Yori were both trained in beating far tighter and more paranoid security, so they had little trouble in gaining a much-less dramatic entrance of their own. Ron's late arrival was fortuitous because his unique ability to Bend energy fields allowed the five girls to escape from an energy cage with which Jim Possible was trying to manoeuvre them into an artificial black hole. In the resulting battle, Kim put a lightning bolt into a control panel and the black hole suddenly went out of control. It could have destroyed the Earth had Kim not, for the first time, found the ability to call on the Avatar State and combine all her powers to cast the space-time anomaly into the depths of interstellar space.

Mr. Dr. P had tried to use the distraction of Kim's transformation to attempt to _shoot_ his daughter in the back, screaming hysterically about 'demons'. His gun and his hand were instantly lying on the floor at his feet and he was looking into the warm brown eyes of Ron Stoppable, the deadly razor-sharp edge of the Lotus Blade touching his throat. "_Can't let you do that, Mr. Dr. P.,_" Ron had announced, his face and voice expressionless.

Aang had once told Kim that Bending powers ran in bloodlines. Just as Kim had inherited Water-bending from Anne, it turned out that Jim and Tim had inherited Earth-bending from their father. It was also a fact that emotional disturbances can shake one's control of one's Element. So it proved now, as Jim Possible's rage at seeing his plans and all hope of destroying the 'unnatural freaks' ruined broke his fanatical repression of his Earth-bending powers, which promptly lashed out. In seconds, the Richter-10 quake that he unleashed had consumed the Middleton Space Centre, turning decades of cutting-edge research into space technology into rubble and scrap metal. Only the power of the Avatar State enabled Kim to contain the massive energy release. However, the contained energy had to be released _somewhere_ and was done so by reducing the area of the Space Centre to nothing but shattered rock, pulverised concrete and torn strips of metal like the set of some post-apocalyptic movie.

Kim regained her full, individual self again in the ruins of her father's lab. The man was huddled on the floor, shivering and cradling his maimed arm to his chest whilst moaning what sounded like almost _prayers_ for Kim's death. Kim looked around frantically for her lover and her friends. When she saw only ruins and death, she nearly lost control and was about to cook the creature that, by some mischance, was her father in the full fury of the Fire. Then the ground broke open and her friends emerged, having been protected in a bubble of stone that Joss had hastily erected around them.

Kim realised that Jim Possible was a danger to everyone, and that this danger was only made greater with his powers. Guided by a saddened and reluctant Aang, she focussed her Spirit-bending into her father's Chakra points, sealing off his powers forever. Then she handed her father over to Will Du, who had just arrived in response to a frantic call to GJ from Kim's mother.

Dr. James Possible promptly escaped from GJ's holding cells and founded a group known as "Friends of True Humanity". An alliance of various fanatical religions and extreme political groups, the FTH had one unifying objective – the destruction of _all_ meta-humans and the Avatar in particular. Not even Shego frightened Kim quite as much as her father did now.

* * *

Stopping her father's spontaneous earthquake had seemingly released something in Kim. She realised that it was possible for her to stem floods, snuff out forest fires, stop volcanoes and turn aside landslides. She and her friends spent the next six months saving lives and changing the world. Although Kim, as always, was sure to ensure her friends got their fair share of the praise (and more), there was no doubt about whose was the true power that saved the day, time and time again. It was that of the Avatar (and Kim never found out who had leaked the title to the Media, her father probably).

It was The Avatar who had stopped the drought in North East Africa by water-bending an Antarctic iceberg all the way to the Horn of Africa. It was The Avatar who saved countless lives when she stopped a river of lava from reaching a collection of villages and tourist resorts in Indonesia. It was The Avatar who turned aside a hurricane bearing down on poor and ill-prepared islands in the Caribbean.

With every miracle, Kim's confidence and mastery of the Elements increased. Unbeknownst to her, it also made the legend of The Avatar grow ever greater.

Then, as had long been prophesied, the Lowardians returned.

…

What followed proved that Warhok's attack was little more than a probing raid compared to what the green-skinned extraterrestrials could do if they chose to. Every major city was attacked from orbit and major military sites were devastated. Only an early evacuation, thanks to a timely warning from Kim to Global Justice, prevented a massacre with a death toll in the _billions_. When the Lowardians sent down a literal _plague_ of war robots and shock troops to attack and pacify the population, then the battle was truly joined.

Although the robots (walkers, fish-like submarines and fliers) were able to defeat any human weapon, they were less effective against Benders, whose powers didn't even always _register_ to sensors. They could be crushed by controlled rock formations and super-dense water masses, torn apart by hurricane-force winds and whirlpools, melted or blasted apart by fire blasts and shot full of holes by barrages of rock and ice daggers. With the majority of their technology defeated, the Lowardians' ground troops proved as vulnerable to human military technology as any conventional foe.

However, all could yet be lost. The Lowardian star-fleet in orbit was capable and apparently quite willing to reduce the entire surface of Earth to a flat plain of radioactive glass. There was only one with the power to face them… So it fell to Kim… _It fell to The Avatar_.

Kim _hated_ invoking the Avatar State and was thankful that it had so infrequently been necessary. When she did so, she wasn't really _Kim_ anymore but an amalgam of all the 255 or more spirits of all the Avatars, channelling the full power of the Spirit Plane through her body. She lost all sense of individuality and her unique personality, subsumed in a supernatural force that defied human description.

Propelled first by the Air and then by utilising the power of Spirit, Earth and Fire to ride the Earth and Sun's magnetic fields into space, The Avatar lanced towards the Lowardian flagship, Bending aside the starship's plasma cannon-fire like they were no more than spit-balls. She slammed into its hull and, calling on the Earth, reshaped the alien alloys of the huge vessel (for they were just refined metals and other minerals, products of rock and soil no matter what planet they came from). She ripped the ship apart, spilling tens of thousands of the invaders, screaming in horror, helplessly into the merciless vacuum of space.

For a long moment, The Avatar stood amidst the wreckage of the starship, bending aside incoming energy weapons fire and missiles as if they were no more significant than dust motes. Then she began bending them back to their vessels of origin, turning the invaders' weapons back upon themselves, beating down their shields. She reshaped the debris of the flagship into a deadly cloud of thousand-foot-long lances that she launched at surrounding ships, ripping through their weakened shields and hulls, impaling them like vast metal fish on harpoons. Reaching out to the bound sun-like Fire that powered those vessels untouched by that attack, she broke those bindings one by one, turning the enemy's fortress-like vessels into enormous star-like explosions one after another. She called to the Fire of their destruction bending it into an ever spreading web of fusion plasma blasts, tearing apart ship after ship.

Finally, she stood alone, three hundred miles above the Earth, with the tattered remains of the enemy fleet retreating in a full, disorderly rout. She made her words echo through the Air in each remaining ship. "_The Earth is protected. Any who seek to conquer it will find nothing but their own destruction. Never come this way again_."

…

Kim… no, _The Avatar_… landed on the steps of the Congress Building in Washington. She gazed around her emotionlessly, her eyes shining blue-white with power until Ron walked over and hugged her. "Come back to me, KP," he whispered gently into her ear. "It's over. You can come back to me now." The redheaded woman blinked a few times and suddenly Kim was back, looking at Ron through puzzled green eyes.

"Ron? Th… The Lowardians?"

"Gone. Running for their lives, thanks to you, KP."

Bonnie, Monique, Tara, Joss and Yori stepped forwards from the crowds. "They've been beaten on every continent, K," Bonnie confirmed. "The few that are left are surrendering faster than we can take 'em prisoner!"

"It's over, girl," Monique added. "Your plan worked BTACHH." That, Kim guessed, meant 'Better than anyone could have hoped'.

"Yeah!" Joss agreed, with her usual exultant grin at having caused some kind of destruction. "We've done it! We've got 'em beat!"

Yori nodded in sober agreement. "The day is ours, _Kim-sama_," she announced loudly. "The day is _yours_." Then, as any officer of her culture would do after delivering a report to her superior at the battle's end, she bowed sharply from the waist. It was nothing particularly significant in its own right, but it seemed to trigger something in the crowd that Kim regretted to this day and for which she still somewhat blamed Yori.

_Everyone_ echoed Yori's bow. _Everyone_. The thousands of people who had been standing around the Capitol all bowed, either oriental style or occidental style, dropping onto one knee.

Kim stood there, shaking her head desperately holding up her hands as if to ward off the bows. "No…!" she murmured desperately. "No, no, no, no! No, please don't do this! Please don't! I… I'm just _Kim_… just an ordinary girl…! Please, don't…!"

"_Hail to the Avatar!_" someone shouted and the cry was taken up by all of the crowd.

Last to bow were Kim's travelling companions, starting with Bonnie (who winked at her old High School rival in a way that indicated that, on a certain level, she was enjoying her distress). "Hail to the Avatar," she said in a sincere tone as she dropped to one knee and lowered her head in respect.

Last to move was Ron, who smiled at her in love and approval and nodded once in an attempt at reassurance before dropping to one knee, bowing and repeating the words: "Hail to the Avatar."

So, Kim Possible, The Avatar, stood alone, looking at thousands of people bowing before her and shouting out her praise… She had never felt so lost and so utterly _alone_.

* * *

Kim allowed the Air to drop her down in front of the converted warehouse and office complex in Middleton that she had taken as her combined headquarters and home. She drew in a breath to centre herself and shake off the last of the annoyance she felt at Ed still, after all the chances she gave him, acting like a spoilt child. Sitches like this always left her feeling a little drained, not because she wasn't powerful enough to handle them but because restraining herself so that she didn't accidentally _kill_ someone was very difficult and took a lot of concentration.

Kim could have flown down to the rooftop terrace garden of her residence. However, she instead chose to enter through the entrance to the headquarters building like a travelling company representative returning to the office. For some reason, it made Kim feel more part of the team of various people who helped ensure that the Avatar knew where she was needed and always had the backup that she needed, either legal, diplomatic, technological or even military, wherever and whenever she needed it. "Afternoon, Zita!" she called cheerfully to the Latina woman sitting at the reception desk.

"Er… Lady Avatar!" Zita Flores squeaked, jumping to her feet and shooting Kim a brief, formal half-bow from the waist.

Kim rolled her eyes. "None of that Zita," she said, waving idly. "You know that I don't judge my worth on the number of backs I can see bowing before me. Now, has anything come in whilst I was dealing with that overgrown man-child out in Nevada?"

Zita shook her head. "No, my Lady," she said. Kim noticed that Zita was keeping her eyes lowered. "Everything is under control. Lord Stoppable is currently out and the others are all currently conducting classes." That was one big major element of their lives that they hadn't initially expected. Kim agreed with the spirits of her predecessors that formal training was needed to control elemental powers and she had used her considerable clout, post-war, to arrange for that. Anyone who attained to a mastery of control over their Element was expected (and legally bound) to help others to reach a certain level of control and discipline themselves. Naturally, to be taught by one of The Avatar's travelling companions (one of the Order of the White Lotus, as they now called themselves) was a particular honour. So Bonnie, Monique, Tara and Joss always had more potential students than they could handle. Bonnie quite enjoyed having a waiting list for her services. Oddly enough, so did Joss.

"Good, I'm heading up to the residence. Don't call me unless something big comes up."

"Yes, my Lady," Zita replied, still not meeting Kim's eyes.

Kim sighed and walked over to Zita. "Zita? How many times have I told you that I'm 'Kim'? I'm not 'My Lady' to you. Not to someone who's known me for years, since before the Elements awoke, since I was just a teenager like any other!"

"It… it wouldn't be appropriate to address The Avatar by name," Zita said, her voice shaking slightly.

Kim touched Zita's chin and forced the other woman to look into her eyes. "I'm not that sort of person, Zita," she said gently. "The moment that I become such a person, I'd be denying everything that The Avatar is supposed to be. Please, don't think that you have to be afraid of me."

"I… I'm not afraid," Zita replied, almost in a whisper. "I could _never_ be afraid of you. I _love_ you, my Lady! But… But you are the _Avatar of the Spirits_! How could I _ever_ consider myself worthy of looking at you?" Kim sighed as Zita looked down again, and noticed again that, instead of a crucifix, Zita was wearing a necklace with a small circlet marked with the emblems of the four Elements. The symbol of the Church of the Avatar.

Bonnie claimed that she couldn't work out why this freaked Kim out so much, because she would _love_ to be in this sitch! Kim wondered if that was true. In her view, it was _wrong-sick_ in so many ways that Kim couldn't even _begin_ to enumerate them. The realisation that Zita, who she met and worked with every day, _worshipped her as a living goddess_ sometimes left Kim nearly hyperventilating in horror! Hell, she had come upon the woman _praying_ to her! Worse still, that she was one of _tens of millions_ of that creed!

Okay, she'd been able to do a lot of good over the ten years since she was chosen by the Avatar Spirit. Just on Kim's word, people were willing to do things and that meant that a lot of the world's troubles were a lot less troubling. She had convinced richer nations to stop hoarding food, medicine and wealth. She had convinced people to give up archaic traditions and work towards equality and justice. She had convinced tribes to surrender ancient hatreds and try to live in peace. However, all she was, in her view, was someone who was simply doing what _needed_ to be done! Anyone with a conscience would have done the same! To try to turn her into a _deity_ just because she had a few extra powers compared to others…? For heaven's sake, she regularly attended Temple with Ron! Didn't these people think it even _slightly_ odd that their 'living goddess' had a faith of her own?

Kim had never sought power, even now. She _never_ forced herself onto any sitch, rather she only went in when invited or if it was clear that things had deteriorated beyond any reasonable hope of it being fixed otherwise. She also made it clear that she was only ever an adviser and an arbitrator, _never_ a dictator imposing her will on the nations of the world. Nonetheless, the Avatar's power and wisdom was considered to be the 'Last Word' by most ordinary people and even the most cynical and selfish were wary of provoking her ire.

She had tried to discourage the Church. However, as Tara had wisely pointed out, things like this had a momentum all of their own. Even a public denunciation would not dissuade people other than to provoke understanding, worshipful smiles and comments of: "_Well, of course, she _would_ say stuff like that, wouldn't she?_". So, _let_ people put their faith in her and let that be something that motivated them to do good rather than act selfishly! Kim understood the blonde Air-bender's point, but it didn't make her feel any better about this. She promised to keep an eye on the Church and, the minute it took a wrong step, she planned to come down on it _hard_.

* * *

With a sigh, Kim walked into the central room of her residence, a combination of living space, personal office and sanctum sanctorum that took up the top two levels of The Avatar's Home Complex. (She had got more than a little annoyed with Zita when she caught the woman describing the Complex as 'The Middleton Temple'.)

The redheaded woman unbelted and pulled off her white tunic with its blue, green, orange and red piping and long front and back tabards. Her wrist and shin bracers joined it in being flung onto a nearby easy-chair. She unfastened the top securing tabs of her sea-blue skin-tight jump-suit and sagged down in the centre of the room. She took in a deep breath and, arranging herself into the Lotus Position, dropped into the shallowest level of meditation, allowing the tensions of the mission and her continuing frustration with the very _existence_ of the Church of the Avatar to play themselves out and fade away. Only by maintaining her mental, emotional and spiritual balance could the Avatar control her powers properly. By force of necessity, Kim, who normally had a very unsettled and continually-moving mind, had become very good at meditating and stilling her thoughts.

She was just entering the second level and touching the ever-present wisdom of her predecessors, when she detected three distinct and oh-so-welcome life-sparks approaching her. She drew herself out of her meditation just in time for warm, welcome lips to press themselves to the side of her neck. She growl-purred in pleasure and then reached up to pull the owner of those lips away slightly so she could turn her head and claim them with her own. "Hey, KP," Ron said with a smirk. "I see I didn't catch you by surprise!"

Kim grinned. "Of course not!" The last time Ron had caught her by surprise was early in her training, before she and Joss had worked out how to detect people by the vibrations they generated and were detectable by sufficiently powerful and skilled Earth-benders. This was a good thing, because the last time he caught her by surprise in that manner, she lost her control and accidentally made every faucet and spigot in the hotel in which they were staying burst _simultaneously_.

"Hard day?" Ron asked, settling down behind her. He began to massage Kim's stiff shoulder and neck muscles.

"No big," Kim replied. "Just Motor Ed actin' out." Kim sighed, closed her eyes and leant into Ron's powerful fingers. "Mmm… Man, I need this! Ron, do you Spirit-bend through your fingers or something?"

Ron laughed. "No Bending trickery here, KP! Just the Ron-man and his magic fingers!"

"Well, I'd be willing to tolerate the Church so long as they canonise those fingers!"

Ron waggled his eyebrows. "Only my fingers?" he teased.

Kim raised an eyebrow and smiled sensually. "You know that _I _worship every last bit of you, _Big Ron_!" Ron laughed and the two lovers claimed each other's lips again.

That was one area in which Kim considered herself to have triumphed over those who seemed determined to put her on a pedestal, surrounded by air-tight glass and turn her into some kind of living icon. There were those who, with more than a touch of anti-Semitism, had lobbied hard against Ron being permitted to 'sully' the Avatar with his touch. The fact that she _liked_ being 'sullied' by his touch didn't seem to actually bear any relevance in those blowhards' minds. According to them, she was supposed to be dedicated to a 'higher calling', not the 'crude matters of the flesh'! Kim was more than pleased to put those _idiots_ straight. The fact that _none_ of the previous Avatars had been hermits or celibate only added to Kim's determination to pursue her relationship with Ron and to make it _as public as possible_.

"Yuck! Mom! Dad! Do you have to do that in front of us?"

Kim shot a dangerous glare at the speaker, one of blond twins standing at the entrance to the room. "Yes," she responded firmly. "You know that mommy and daddy like kissing. Now, c'mere and get your own!"

Two wriggling bundles of energy and love ran into Kim's embrace and she held them to her, leaning down to smell their hair. Justin and Jessica were the most public declaration of her love for Ron, more public than even the vows they swore in the National Cathedral in Washington D.C. (meddling politicians making a small wedding at the Middleton Synagogue impossible). They were the final and definitive proof that The Avatar considered the gangly and noble young man worthy of her – worthy of her love, of her devotion, of her wifely obedience and worthy to father her children. If anyone protested that this was too _mundane_ for the Avatar, she'd remind them that Avatar Kyoshi had a dozen children and that it was her spirit that had helped Kim figure out breast-feeding the twins.

Kim smiled at her two five-year-old treasures. "So! How are my two li'l Cloud-benders, hmmm? Had a fun day at school?"

"Kindergarten was great, Mommy!" Jessica said. "We did finger-painting and Miss Chievous read us more the story of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory!"

"Yeah! We learnt to sing the Oompa-Lumpa Song!" Justin added excitedly. "Now we've got to paint a picture of… um… what was it?"

"Of The Avatar and her Order!" Jessica concluded, flawlessly mimicking her teacher's voice. "People are sure funny about you, daddy, Auntie Bonnie, Auntie Joss, Auntie Mon, Yori-san and Auntie Tara!"

Kim managed to keep a grimace off of her face. She was desperately trying to keep her oh-so-public role as far out of her children's upbringing as humanly possible. She wanted them to be Justin and Jessica Stoppable, not The Avatar's Children, with all the nonsense from the Church and publicity-seekers that this would likely cause. She certainly didn't want people dropping down on their knees and genuflecting when they walked past, the way some of the Church's more fanatical adherents did to her! "Well, you know people can be silly," she said aloud. "Now, you two get changed and I'll start dinner."

…

"So, I stopped off at the Aerie," Ron announced as he stirred Kim's chicken curry, referring to Drew Lipsky's mountain-side home and laboratory. "The reverse-engineering of the Lowardians' shield technology is going good. We should have a working prototype within a few months!"

Kim nodded. "That's good news. We can beat them on the ground but we're still vulnerable to attack from space; Those things would do a lot to level the playing field." She took a mouthful and mentally thanked Avatar Leila, an Air Nomad who lived almost four thousand years ago and also happened to be a gourmet cook. Without her, Kim had no doubt that she would still be burning water. "How's Mom doing?"

"She was over the moon!" Ron said with a grin. "That patient with the inoperable brain tumour?" Kim nodded to confirm her recollection of the case. "You were right. The water from the Spirit Lake in the mountains over Yamanouchi did the job, although it was a near-run thing, 'cording to your Mom." Ron paused as if he were thinking about something. "Your Mom wants to run an experiment. She… uh… She wants to see if the Spirit Water could revivify her ovaries and womb!"

Kim sighed. It was one of her mother's great frustrations that, being in her fifth decade when they married, she had been unable to give Drew a child of his own. "Not good, Ron. I'll have to tell her that I don't think it would work. No matter how she tries to spin it, it's a _selfish_ goal, and the Spirits don't work that way. At least not any one that's she'd want involved with a child." Ron nodded sadly in agreement. He'd _met_ Koh. Not exactly the nicest of guys.

"Mommy, can we have Ronni and Amy over tomorrow night?"

Kim looked over at Jessica at the mention of her two Fire-bender friends. Veronica or 'Ronni' was Bonnie's daughter by Ned and Amy was Shego's daughter, whom the villain had abandoned in an orphanage soon after her birth. Bonnie (much to everyone's surprise) had taken Amy in and adopted as her own. "Well… have you asked Auntie Bonnie? Remember that I _will_ ask her myself!" The twins both nodded frantically, their eyes wide and innocent. "Okay, then… But only if you promise to do your homework before the four of you start goofing off and causing havoc!"

"Aw, Mommy!" Justin pleaded.

"Don't 'Aw' me, Justin! Grades are important!" The twins both shot Kim a Puppy Dog Pout. "No, don't try that! Remember who invented that! I'm _immune_!"

The twins sighed, rolled their eyes and replied in unison. "Okay, Mommy!"

It was amazing how _normal_ things could be in Kim's life…

…

Kim let her husband, her mate, her lover, lower her back onto the bed, her eyes locked onto his warm brown gaze. "I love you so much, Ron," she whispered. Then she closed her eyes and groaned as his oh-so-skilful hands began to caress her.

"I love you too, my little goddess." That should freak Kim out, but it didn't. Ron had told her that she had _always_ been his perfect goddess. Bender or not, Avatar or not, she would have always been a shining light in the sky to him. It was a love and devotion that stole Kim's breath away.

If she were to succeed at this 'Avatar' gig, it wouldn't be because of the support staff at the Complex. It surely wouldn't be because of the Church. It wouldn't even be because of the spirits of those who had gone before her. No, it would be because of people like Ron, her friends, her family, but most of all because of Ron. Because he loved _Kim Possible_, not The Avatar. The little girl in the sand box, that scrawny girl with radio-antenna braces on her teeth, the head cheerleader hiding massive insecurities behind a go-getter façade, the broken young woman tied to a column in the _Bueno Nacho_ headquarters building, the woman whose triumphs he had shared and who had always come first in his life. He loved the woman who had borne his children, the woman whose pleasure was, at this very moment, the focus of his attention; His lover, his soul-mate and his best friend. So long as she had him, she would never lose her humanity, lose herself in her role and become the super-human _force_ that so many imagined her to be.

She had never wanted to be a global hero, an icon or a celebrity. She hadn't wanted to be the protector of an entire world, a symbol and guarantor of peace, harmony and justice. She sure as _heck_ hadn't wanted to be a _goddess_. Fate had other plans.

That didn't matter, though. Because those things were not the _real_ Kim. The real Kim was this woman being loved by her man. A wife, mother, friend and daughter. A person who was trying to do the right thing whenever she could. A woman who was trying to build a better world for her children. _This_ was what truly defined her, what was truly the path she walked and where she had found _true _enlightenment. As Kim felt her higher brain functions dissolve beneath her husband's attentions, she realised that it was more than enough.

**Endnote**

If anyone wants to write stories in the _Avatar – The Legend of Kim _universe, please feel free to do so.


	10. Families

**Sitches Aplenty**

A Repository of KP Shorts

**Disclaimer**

Kim Possible and the characters and situations of the Kim Possible universe were created by Mark McCorkle and Bob Schooley for the Disney Channel and are the copyright of the Walt Disney Corporation. This is a non-profit fan work for free distribution through the world-wide web. No breach of trademark or copyright is intended.

**Author's Notes**

This is going to be a series of short stories where I take Kim Possible, her friends and her enemies places dictated by my own imagination. These short stories are not part of any larger continuity and will only be linked if I specifically say so in my introductory notes.

Censor: T – Just for safety's sake

Back to my Next Generation 'verse now. I'm blocked at the moment with continuing Sherylin and Amy's story, so instead I've got a character study of my version of adult Bonnie. She's only really been mostly background anyway, so far, so an insight into her current life and relationships was overdue (and I'm sure she'd agree with that). My OC in this, despite the name, is no relation to the hero of the 19th-Century Peninsular War. Oddly enough, he is loosely based on a character I created for a never-finished Sailor Moon story.

P.S.: Some people were shocked by how I used Mr. Dr. P. in my previous story. Just remember: The whole world had changed radically and there has been nasty edges on the character of Kim's father before (such as his not restoring her memory of Ron) that implies that he likes _control_ a bit _too _much. I thought that people would be shocked but I don't consider it impossible in truly abnormal circumstances.

**9. Families**

Mary Chievous, the current teacher at North Middleton Kindergarten, had always thought that teaching a group of four- to six-year-olds, whilst potentially stressful, was essentially quite an easy vocation. She hadn't factored in the possibility that she would be teaching the children of Kim Possible and her various friends and kin. Those kids alone redefined the term 'challenging'. Oh, it wasn't as if they were _disruptive_ in any way. There was just something _weird_ about how they behaved sometimes.

"This is very nice, Ronni," she managed as she looked at the picture that the five-year-old brunette had handed to her. "Um... You know, you were meant to draw a picture of your family!"

Ronni shot Miss Chievous an innocent look, one that didn't fool the teacher for a moment. Having one of the most naturally gifted legal advocates in Colorado as a mother meant that Veronica 'Ronni' Rockwaller was an accomplished actress who could feign almost any kind of expression and make words jump through hoops. "Well... it is the people who I think of as family," the girl chirped.

Miss Chievous raised her eyebrow. "So... Who are in the picture?"

Ronni rolled her eyes; Clearly she thought that the answer was obvious. "There's me and mommy," she said, pointing to two stick figures with brown hair, the taller of the two very obviously in a child's approximation of a businesswoman's power suit.

"And the others?" Miss Chievous asked, gesturing to the three blond figures and one with long red hair.

"There's Uncle Ron, Auntie Kim, Justin and Chess... Oops, I mean Jessica!" Out of the corner of her eye, the teacher noticed Jessica Stoppable's scowl and figured that there was a story behind that pet name.

"The Stoppables, you mean?" Ronni nodded thoughtfully. Miss Chievous knew that the girl was close to the Stoppable family but she didn't realise that she was that close to them! "So, Justin and Jessica's mommy and daddy feel like your aunt and uncle?"

"It isn't as if Auntie Connie and Auntie Lonnie are worth much!" the little girl's tone was scornful.

Based on what she saw of the two elder Rockwaller sisters in the tabloids, Miss Chievous had to agree with Ronni's assessment. In fact, she doubted that those two society wastrels would ever be interested enough in their far more settled youngest sister to have any relationship with their niece. Even though Bonnie had followed the family's regrettable habit of getting pregnant out of wedlock, she had walked a far more respectable path in life than her infamous hell-raising older siblings.

"We, me and mommy I mean, spend so much time over Justin and Chess'ka's house that it's like home! Most of my toys are there and I've slept in Chess'ka's room so often it's like it was mine too!"

This was a detail Miss Chievous hadn't known or guessed. It was a matter of public record that Kim Stoppable and Bonnie Rockwaller, the co-owners and partners of Stoppable-Rockwaller Associates, Attorneys-at-Law, had known each other since high school. It made sort of sense that they would be friends too. Okay, maybe occasional baby-sitting would make sense but the Stoppable residence becoming a second home? Some worry or unease was tickling the back of the teacher's mind although she couldn't really nail it down as anything in particular. "Do you enjoy it over there?"

"Oh yeah! It's boring at home most days! At least when I'm around Justin and Chess'ka's place, we can play! When Amy and Max are around, it's really cool all the fun we have! 'Specially sleepover! We're all there in the morning! Me, Chess'ka, Justin, Auntie Kim, Uncle Ron, Mommy! Sometimes Auntie Sherylin and Amy too!"

Miss Cheivous nodded. "Well, next time, could you label your pictures? So I don't have to guess who is in it?" Ronnie shot the teacher an odd look but nodded in agreement.

"Thank you for coming in on such short notice, Ms. Rockwaller," Miss Cheivous said.

The brunette attorney with blue-grey eyes sat down opposite Ronni's teacher and smiled in a way that was, at the same time, both bland and threatening. Bonnie had a reputation for tap-dancing on the graves of the reputations of people who pissed her off. It was exaggerated but she found it useful. "I'm always interested in hearing about Ronni's progress," she responded diplomatically. "So, what seems to be up?"

* * *

"Ms. Rockwaller," Miss Cheivous began and then stopped, unsure of how to continue. She decided to start on a topic that was less likely to cause offence. "I have noticed that Ronni has the strangest way of pronouncing Jessica Stoppable's name."

Bonnie laughed; She'd lost count of the number of times she, K or even Sherry had to explain that one. "Amy Goh has a very slight speech impediment," she said. "When she first met Jessica, she couldn't quite pronounce her name and it came out "Chess'ka" instead. The other kids in our circle latched onto it and it became a 'play' name. I'm not sure if Jessica really likes it, but she's willing to tolerate it so long as it's only her friends saying it."

"And if anyone else says it?"

Bonnie grinned wolfishly. "Only Justin is allowed to tease his sister and he is quite capable of defending his claim!"

"Yes... I have noticed that Justin, Jessica, Amy and, on occasion, Ronnie, are very protective of the other kids and will not tolerate intimidation or exclusion."

Bonnie rolled her eyes. "There are too many do-gooders and heroes in their lives! I'm pretty sure they want to fight 'the good fight' too!" Bonnie raised a hand to forestall any comment. "Don't fret - The Stoppables aren't in any way encouraging dangerous behaviour. You've got to admit though, both when they were heroes and now as community leaders, they set a very strong example of public service and aiding the imperilled. Like all kids everywhere, the twins naturally want to emulate their parents. As for Ronnie? Well, she just doesn't like seeing little kids get pushed around."

Miss Chievous nodded. Certainly, the youngsters in questions were hardly dressing up in super-suits and fighting supervillains. That said, protective behaviour could easily become dominance and she would be watching very carefully that they were not trying to take charge of other kids' lives. Additionally... well, she'd seen the footage on the media; Ron and Kim Stoppable were both lethally-skilled martial artists. She would need to make it very clear at the next Parent/Teacher conference that she didn't want to see either of their children using these skills.

Well, now onto the harder bit. "Ms. Rockwaller, your domestic arrangements are none of my business. However, I had a very puzzling conversation with Ronni recently and I wanted to discuss it with you." The teacher paused to gather her thoughts before continuing. "I know that you do not have the most harmonious relationship with your parents and sisters, Ms. Rockwaller. However, I'm really unsure how healthy it is for Ronnie to have such a strong relationship with the Stoppable children that she regards them and their parents as being more family than her blood relations."

Bonnie raised an elegantly-sculpted eyebrow. She wondered where that had come from...? Oh! Of course! The 'family' painting. "Well, Kim and her kids have been part of Ronni's life since all three were born. Kim is Ronni's godmother and I'm Jessica's godmother, so they consider themselves to be 'god-sisters' – their phrase." Bonnie sighed. "Look... You know that I was raped at one of my sisters' parties? Ronni's father is unknown and I doubt he'll ever be identified. My parents weren't..." she scowled. "They weren't best pleased with my stated determination not to have an abortion the way my sisters seem to do so casually. We've mended a lot of bridges since her birth but both sides said things that aren't easy to forget. And, let's face it, no sane parent would let Connie and Lonnie within a mile of their child. So K and Ron were my support structure before and after Ronni's birth." Bonnie shrugged. "You form bonds when you go to ante-natal classes together and have a joint baby shower! I guess we got close and we've only got closer!" _Sisters, in all but blood_, Bonnie added silently.

Miss Chievous nodded reluctantly. "Nonetheless, one has to wonder why she spends so much time at the Stoppables' house rather than her own."

Bonnie nodded, her smile suddenly jacking up a few notches to 'hungry shark' as she realised where this was going. "You were right," she said at last. "My domestic arrangements are none of your business."

The young teacher spluttered for a few moments. "Ms. Rockwaller, I am legally obliged to follow up and report any indication that any of the children are in any way being brought up in unsuitable, unstable or even abusive home environments! Now, as you say, as an adult you have every right to live your life as you please but if it affects your daughter's emotional health...!"

Bonnie didn't react although she _desperately_ wanted to put the other woman in her place. "You are correct about your legal obligations. If you do have any evidence that Ronni is at risk, you must report it." Bonnie leant forwards, her face expressionless. "_However_, Miss Chievous, should the County School Board be so foolish as to begin proceedings, you can be very sure that it will be facing a counter-suit for libel and malicious prosecution that will make your head spin!"

Miss Chievous swallowed nervously. "Are you threatening me?"

Bonnie smirked as she leaned back again. "I'm simply offering you some free legal advice. If you're going to pull the trigger, make sure that you are aiming at the right target and be _damn_ sure that they aren't in a position to shoot back."

Before the thoroughly-intimidated teacher could gather her wits enough to bluster, Bonnie continued. "_Now_, as I have explained, Kim, Ron and I have developed a very close relationship over the years, certainly closer than the one I have with my family. That means that we visit them many times. As I also pointed out, Ronni has as close a relationship with Jessica and Justin as she would have with any blood siblings. Naturally, I have encouraged her to maintain that relationship because very close friendships are a key to emotional health. Wouldn't you agree with that?" Miss Chievous nodded and was about to speak when Bonnie continued. "I have many friends, but only a few of them still live in Middleton. Frankly, I don't like being on my own any more than anyone else. So, when Ronni has a sleep-over with Jessica and Amy, the parents have a 'sleep over' of their own... or at least that is how the kids seem to perceive it. It saves time if they are at the same venue. Surely you would agree that it is entirely normal and legal for me to wish to pursue my own friendships?" Once again the teacher nodded. "And I'm sure you would agree that pursuing friendships with a stable family is infinitely preferable to inflicting a string of casual lovers on Ronni?" Miss Chievous nodded again and tried to get a word in edgeways. Bonnie didn't give her a chance. "Good. I assume therefore that you will not be making an ill-founded report to your superiors?"

The teacher sighed and shook her head. "Ms. Rockwaller, I never meant any offence...!"

Bonnie narrowed her eyes coldly. "Then you should be a lot more careful and tactful, Miss Chievous, especially when inflating a child's innocent tales and exaggeration into some kind of accusation of impropriety towards their parents! Fortunately for you, Ronni loves it here, so I will not be withdrawing her. However, if I see any indication that you are harassing her for further 'proof' of your unfounded suspicions, I will be making a complaint to the District Superintendent. Is that clear?"

The thoroughly-intimidated teacher nodded frantically. Bonnie stood up and glared at the other woman with her best expression of superior disdain. "Excellent. I trust that you will not be so foolish as to harass myself, Mr. and Mrs. Stoppable or Ms. Goh any further with regard to these imaginary 'issues'." Bonnie turned to leave but suddenly one last point occurred to her. "Miss Chievous, every child needs a family. Unfortunately, my blood kin are not the sort of family that I would ever wish upon my daughter. So, I have simply found her a suitable family with whom she can grow up. That is my obligation and it is something that I personally _desired_ before she was even born. I have no doubt that you were fortunate enough to be raised in a broadly 'conventional' family. Not all of us are that fortunate. However, I believe that I have done for Ronni as best as I am able. Good day, madam." With that she turned away and strode out, her head held high.

Miss Chievous found that her throat was dry and her heart was pounding.

* * *

Bonnie was an expert in controlling and hiding her feelings. It was, after all, a basic necessary skill for any court-room advocate. Nonetheless, it was taking a lot of effort not to _storm_ through the halls of the kindergarten and down the path to the street. The unmitigated _gall_ of the woman! What did she think was going on? That Bonnie, Kim and Ron were in some kind of kinky threesome relationship or something?

Bonnie stopped and took a few breaths to settle herself. Truth be told that there was a time, just after Ronni was born, when she was essentially living with Kim and Ron rather than at her apartment, when that _could_ have happened. Bonnie had been horribly lonely at that point, practically disowned by her parents and a social pariah thanks to her back-stabbing sisters. If Kim and Ron had invited her to join their family, she would have jumped at the chance. Bonnie couldn't help but blush as she recalled those old fantasies, some of which dated back to the Junior Year Prom when Kim and Ron _finally _realised that they were a couple (probably being the last ones at Middleton High to do so).

The brunette woman shook her head with a grin. No, that could never have worked out. Not only was Bonnie not the right person psychologically to be the 'third person' in any relationship, she was pretty sure that Ron and Kim's stronger personalities would have ended up dominating her. She'd always been very malleable and suggestible as a teen and young woman. It wasn't until she needed the emotional strength to raise Ronni that she had overcome that aspect of herself. Besides, Ronni had a hard enough time being a child of an unwed mother and sharing a surname with two women who were never out of the scandal sheets. It wouldn't have been right to inflict an '_unusual_' family on her.

Feeling a bit less stressed, Bonnie continued her walk to the street. She couldn't help but be proud of what a wonderful child Ronni was, despite her many disadvantages. She could be possessive and had learnt her mother's ability to exude disdain a bit _too_ well. However, she was also a loyal friend and had an amazingly strong sense of right and wrong. Bonnie had made sure of that. She didn't want Ronni to grow up as she did, assuming that she had the right to take whatever she wanted so long as she was cunning enough. Following that path had led Connie and Lonnie to become little more than high-class _whores _on the celebrity circuit. Bonnie would never want that for someone she loved.

It had been hard and lonely, bringing up Ronni on her own. It was true that she visited Kim and Ron regularly and Sherylin had, much to her surprise, had invited her to join her on the occasional night out. However, ultimately, Bonnie hadn't been much into the dating scene. Most guys were not interested in a woman who already had a child and a lot of the guys (and girls, Bonnie had never been picky on the basis of gender) on the singles circuit were not someone that Bonnie was willing to let get near to Ronni through her. So, in the end, it was just her and her little Princess, on their own most days.

Bonnie walked over to the heavily-rebuilt scarlet-and-blue Ford Mustang 1967 parked by the kindergarten's gates. It was hardly the sort of vehicle a lawyer with her formidable reputation would drive. However, with her BMW 5-series in the shop, she needed a ride. Fortunately, the guy sitting on the vehicle's bonnet was available. "Is everything okay, Bonnie?"

"Fine, Rich!" Bonnie smiled and surprised herself with how warm and genuine it was as Officer Richard Sharpe of the Triton Sheriff's Department stood up from where he had been sitting and waiting for her meeting to end. "Ronni's teacher's a bit imaginative and was reading stuff into Ronni's homework that wasn't there!"

The brown-haired, dark-eyed young man frowned slightly. "There's a story behind this, isn't there?"

Bonnie rolled her eyes. "When you're a Rockwaller, everyone expects you to be some kind of sex-crazed, drug- and alcohol-dependent, party-animal _slut_. When your best friends are Ron and Kim Stoppable, everyone wants there to be a scandal to dent their squeaky-clean image!" She shrugged. "You get used to it."

What Bonnie didn't say (and surprised herself by thinking) was that she _really _hoped that this guy _wanted_ to get used to it.

Bonnie hadn't really been interested in dating, finding a string of excuses from 'Ronni is too young' to 'No one is interested in a nearly-thirty single mother'. She had even avoided finding a man or woman with whom to spend just a night when Sherylin took her out on the town because she felt it would simply lead to complications. She had told herself that she didn't want a relationship. She had told herself that she didn't _need_ a relationship. Ironically, even though she wasn't looking, a guy had come into her life more-or-less by chance.

You meet all sorts at the County Courthouse, most of them the dregs of society. However, sometimes you also meet unexpected nice people whose lives had taken them to the courts of law.

Bonnie had been presenting a plea at a civil litigation case she was handling and had stopped off in the courthouse's small canteen to pick up a coffee before driving back to Stoppable-Rockwaller Associates' office in central Upperton. She sat down at the table with a nice, brown-haired patrolman who she later found out had been testifying in a rather unpleasant DUI case. On a whim, the two of them fell into conversation and were soon laughing like old friends. Rich had a deeply ironic sense of humour, little time for the supposed 'leaders' of society and a big heart.

...

Bonnie looked at her watch. "Damn. Look, Rich, I've really _got_ to go now. I've got to pick my little girl up from kindergarten!"

The young policeman nodded. "Okay, I understand. Look... um... Bonnie?" Bonnie had insisted early on that he use her given name, not call her 'Ms. Rockwaller' as that was her mother's name.

Bonnie looked at him as she stood up. "Yeah?"

"Look... uh... Would you like to do this again sometime?"

Bonnie raised an eyebrow. "What, gossip and tell jokes over coffee and donuts in the courthouse canteen?" she snarked in a deadpan voice.

Rich snorted in laughter. "Not unless you want to, no. I thought... maybe... I dunno, maybe I could take you to a bar sometime or something?" The young policeman's warm brown eyes searched Bonnie's. "It's been fun getting to know you. I'd... Well, I'd like to do it again!"

Bonnie felt her mouth drop open in a most undignified way. "Um... Rich? That... That would be great but I'm not looking to start a relationship right now! What with Ronni and the practice...!"

"Look, no obligation. Just two friends meeting for a drink and to spend time together!"

Bonnie's mouth worked soundlessly for a moment. "I'd like that," her mouth said at last whilst her mind screamed abuse at it. Before her insecurities could come up with an excuse, she reached into the front flap of her briefcase and pulled out a business card (one of the small number that had her personal cell and home numbers on it). "Look, call me tonight and we'll work something out."

"I'll do that." The man took Bonnie's hand and squeezed it, making a shock of _something_ shoot up the woman's spine. "I'll talk to you tonight."

"I'm looking forward to it," Bonnie said with a smile, surprising herself by _meaning_ it.

...

Three of what she was finally able to tell herself were dates later, Bonnie offered her knight-in-shining-armour (or at least a battered red-and-blue Mustang) a little kiss on the cheek before sliding into the passenger-side bucket seat. "Thanks for giving me a lift today, Rich. The transmission on my car's out and I couldn't put this meeting off. The stupid, delusional cow would probably have gone to the County School Board or worse the _press_ if I hadn't quickly nipped this in the bud."

"Price of fame?" Rich asked as he turned the key and hit the ignition button. The turbocharged V8 engine snarled and caught at once.

Bonnie scowled angrily as the Mustang pulled out into the road. "Price of people who _assume_ rather than wait for facts, more like," she growled.

The short drive passed mostly in a thoughtful silence before the Mustang drew smoothly to a halt outside the Stoppables' modernist house. "I'll only be a sec..." Bonnie started, unbuckling the racing-style cross-belt. Then, suddenly she had one of those crazy spontaneous thoughts that had been coming into her life more and more often after she started dating Rich. "On second thoughts, you might as well come in. K will probably want to interrogate me and stew over this 'sitch'. No need for you to sit out here, waiting like a taxi driver!"

"Um... Well, if you think that the Stoppables won't mind?"

Bonnie rolled her eyes and grinned. "Knowing K? She's probably already figured out that I'm dating and will want to meet you anyway!"

Bonnie boldly strode up to the doorstep and heard the motion detector-controlled door-chimes sounding in the house. _One of these days, I'm gonna have to convince Load to let me take on his patent work_, she promised herself. _A motion detector that can tell the difference between a person and a passing cat? A major breakthrough! Him and the Cowpoke could be swimming in money if he wanted to license some of his stuff!_

The door opened to reveal Ron Stoppable. His warm brown eyes lit up and his usual crooked smile appeared as soon as he recognised his visitor. "Hey, Bon-bon!" he greeted. Ron's eyes tracked over to Rich and narrowed slightly, years of instinct identifying someone capable in a fight and also the tell-tale bulge of his concealed-carry Browning Hi-Power semi-auto at his hip. "Who's your bodyguard?"

Bonnie laughed. "His name's Rich, Ron," she said. "He's cool, okay? He's a cop in his day job and we're..." Bonnie thought for a moment and suddenly realised something and announced that fact. "He's my boyfriend!"

Ron caught how the young man's face lit up with surprise and pleasure at that last declaration and his smile returned full force. "Oh! Coolio. Well, why don't you two come in and take a load off?

* * *

"Mommy!" Ronni exploded off the bottom riser of the stairs and flung herself into her mother's arms.

"Hey! Li'l Princess!" Bonnie said, hugging her daughter to her and smelling her hair, suddenly feeling so much _happier_ at having her in her arms. "You been good?"

"Mommy! I'm always good!" Ronni's scandalised tone didn't fool her mother in the slightest and it showed. The little girl laughed. "Yes, I've been good, Mommy. I've been helping Chess'ka braid Amy's hair!" Bonnie hoped that Amy had given her informed consent to this change in grooming or there was a pretty tough meeting with Sherylin in her near future. Ronni leaned closer. "We were just plannin' how to grab Justin and Max so we can do their hair too!" she whispered. Somehow, Bonnie managed not to laugh.

Bonnie straightened up, noting that Ronni, a growing five-year-old, would probably soon be too big for her to do this and turned slightly to see K shaking Rich's hand. She was pleased so see that her... her _boyfriend_... hmmm... she could get used to that... was not doing the whole 'starry eyed fanboy' thing and gushing over K like she was some kind of superstar. She _was_ of course, but she didn't like people treating her that way and frankly neither did Bonnie.

"Mommy, who's that?"

Bonnie looked at Ronni for a moment and considered how best to answer that question. "You know that Mommy has being going out to see someone the last few times you've stayed over here?" The little girl nodded in remembrance. "Well, that's the guy I was seeing. His name's Rich... and... and he's Mommy's boyfriend."

Ronni pondered that thoughtfully as she considered what she knew of boyfriends. "Does that mean that you kiss an' do mushy stuff?" Bonnie somehow nodded without laughing. "Oh. Is it nice?"

Bonnie smiled in a rather dreamy way at the kiss at the end of that most recent date, a kiss quite unlike any she'd had before. "Oh... oh, yes," she confirmed quietly.

Ronni nodded, still looking thoughtful. "Do you like him?"

"I do, Ronni. I do."

Ronni shrugged. "Okay then!"

_That was easy_, Bonnie thought. Of course, if she and Rich were to go much further, it would get harder. She and Ronni hadn't exactly been isolated together the way Sherylin and Amy were but Ronni wasn't exactly used to sharing her mother with someone else either. She put her daughter down and walked over to talk to K.

Ronni marched over to Rich. "So! You're Mommy's boyfriend?" she said, far too loudly, making her mother wince and making Kim's green eyes light up with amusement.

"Yeah, I guess I am," Rich confirmed. "That means that you have to be Ronni, right?"

Ronni's little round face lit up in pleasure at hearing that this strange man knew her name already. Then she remembered her mission. "If you're gonna be Mommy's boyfriend, you're gonna have to promise to be good for me and Mommy. We don't want no trouble! Got that?"

Rich somehow managed not to laugh. "Got that," he confirmed. "I'll try to be good, Ronni."

Ronni nodded firmly. "Good. I'm glad you understand." The little girl seemed excessively smug at this victory. "You can kiss me now. After all, you kiss Mommy, so you should kiss me too!"

Kim hunched into herself, shuddering helplessly with silent laughter as Bonnie suddenly wished for the ground to open up and swallow her whole.

Rich raised an eyebrow at the implicit challenge. "Oh, you want a kiss do you? Well then...!" He knelt on one knee before Ronni and, before the little girl could react, grabbed her behind the knees and shoulders and tilted her backwards, making her squeal in excitement. "One kiss coming right up!" He leaned forwards and placed the smallest, gentlest kiss onto Ronni's forehead before giving her a quick hug. Then he put her back onto her feet and stood up again.

"Hey, Rich, a word?" Ron asked from the sliding glass doors out onto the rear patio.

"Sure, Ron." The two men walked out onto the patio whilst Bonnie strode over to Ronni, who seemed deep in thought.

"I'm sure you thought that was quite funny!" Bonnie growled at her daughter, scowling down at her.

"You're right, Mommy," Ronni said with a funny little smile, not really in reply to her mother's scolding. "He _is_ nice!"

Bonnie sighed and shook her head. "Go and get your bag, Princess. We're going home."

Ronni nodded and raced off back up the stairs. No doubt to tell Amy and Jessica that she'd just had her first kiss and from _Mommy's boyfriend_ no less! Doubtless, Sherylin would be ribbing her about this for the rest of the month. "Bonnie?" Bonnie turned to Kim. "He's a keeper," the redhead said. "Don't screw this up."

"I don't aim to," was Bonnie's reply.

…

Ron considered the other man for a moment before speaking. _When did I suddenly start having to be the responsible one?_ he asked himself. "Rich, look, Bonnie makes out like she's a tough cookie. The thing is, she's been _hurt_. She's been hurt a _lot_, especially by folks she should have been able to trust."

"I've heard some of the story but I guess there's more to it?" Rich looked at Ron Stoppable and reminded himself that this deceptively mild-looking man was one of Earth's greatest warriors.

"There is. It's her story to tell, so I won't say anything. The thing is, though... The thing is that, after all that, Bonnie finds it hard to trust _anyone_. It took me and Kim a long time to get her to open up to us. It took ages for Sherylin to get even the limited level of trust she has now. The point is that she's _into _you man; I saw that right away! She's opening up for you like she hasn't for anyone else for a _long _time, certainly to no guy. When she does that, she becomes vulnerable."

"Ron, Bonnie's the most incredible woman that I've ever met! She's beautiful, caring, _scary _smart and being with her is great! I'm not going to hurt her!"

"What I'm telling you is to be careful, man. She's been hurt and that means she'll have a hard time accepting certain things. You've got to let her do things at her pace and, even harder, you've got to be willing hold back, no matter how much you want it, if you think she's pushin' too fast because she's scared of losin' you."

"She's something special, Ron. I'm not going to screw this up. She's worth a lot more than a roll in the hay!"

Ron nodded in approval. "It's going to be hard doin' this. Do you have what it takes to go into their lives? Ronni's as well as Bonnie's? That little girl is gonna have a hard time accepting someone new in their family."

Rich smiled slightly. "She reminds me of my niece actually. Cute little tyke. I know what you mean, though. I guess one day, she'll shout: 'You can't tell me what to do! You're not my daddy!'"

Ron nodded. "Ready for that?" He slapped the other man on the shoulder. "Look, just one look at Bonnie's face when she said 'boyfriend' told me that you're good for her. All I'm sayin' is... Be careful of her. Treat her right, and that means not to treat her like she's made of glass when hard times come too."

"I'll try."

"She's got good friends, Rich. Good friends that won't want to see her hurt."

Rich managed not to roll his eyes at that implied threat. "Message received, man." Rich cocked his head. "So... Since when were you her big brother?"

Ron snorted. "Bonnie doesn't have any kin, Rich, least none that's worth the name. So it's left to her friends to look out for her instead."

* * *

The Mustang pulled up outside Bonnie's modest-looking two-storey in outer Middleton. "Okay, we're here folks!" Rich announced.

"Yay!" Ronni cheered, not having liked the relatively small rear bench seat of the sports coupe even in the slightest.

Bonnie got out and tilted the front passenger-side seat forward so that her daughter could escape and race up the path to the front door. "Thanks for this, Rich! Today could have been a lot more difficult if you weren't there!"

Rich grinned. "The pleasure's all mine, Bonnie! I'm here for you, any day and at any time, got that?" Bonnie nodded with a smile, feeling her heart swell in pleasure.

"_Come on Mommy!_" Ronni called from the front porch.

"Coming, Princess!" Bonnie leaned forward and Rich's lips touched hers. His left hand touched her shoulder and then slid up to the nape of her neck to hold the kiss for a moment. "I'll see you around... _boyfriend_." Bonnie said, her voice slightly husky. She turned to go.

"Um... Bonnie?" She turned back to him. "Bonnie, when will that be?"

Bonnie grinned. It made her feel like a high school girl again, to have a guy who _wanted_ to be around her so much! "Maybe this weekend," she said, taking his hand. "I haven't got anything planned! Besides! There's always lots of stuff to do on Saturdays!"

Rich nodded. He moved to get back into his car but Bonnie hadn't let go of his hand yet. "What is it, Bonnie?"

The brunette woman was thinking hard; Her face a mask of concentration. "R... Rich?"

"Yeah, beautiful?" Damn, there was that tingle again! Bonnie couldn't believe how one _damn_ word could do that!

"Rich... Are you doing anything... tonight?"

Rich thought about his Spartan apartment in Lowerton. Well, as things stood he had a date with his easy chair and would spend the evening staring at the TV in boredom without actually _seeing_ any of the programs being displayed before setting out his stuff for tomorrow's patrol shift and going to bed early... _again_. Or he might go to a bar and spend an evening nursing a beer and generally not liking the rest of the clientele. "No, not really."

"I... I make a mean chicken curry," Bonnie said, and suddenly fretted at uttering such a non-sequitur. "I mean... What I mean is that I'm making chicken curry for dinner tonight. I... I can make enough for three as easily as I can for two."

"_Mommy are you coming or not?_"

"I... If you're sure? I mean... I wouldn't want to get under your feet or anything!"

"I'm sure... I... You... Ronni's got to get used to you eventually...! Now's as good a time as any!"

Rich grinned. "So... I'm thinking you're hoping for me to spend more time with you... _girlfriend_?" Bonnie sucked in a breath and nodded, biting her bottom lip, her eyes filled with a paradoxical mix of fear and hope. "That sounds great! I mean... Getting to know Ronni better sounds great!" Bonnie giggled at that hasty clarification. "Look, I... I don't want you to feel obliged..."

"No, it's nothing like that. I... I just want you to stay with us... For tonight, I mean." Rich drew in a breath to say something but Bonnie overrode him, squeezing his hand tighter. "Please. Stay."

Rich was silent for a long moment. Then he locked his Mustang's doors and followed his girlfriend up the path to her front door, where her impatient-looking daughter was waiting.


End file.
